Ricardo Viveiros, Global Practice Solution Manager - Supply chain Performance

In your opinion, what are the main challenges facing supply chain management?

Companies today are facing growing globalisation trends and increasing industrial compensations demands. They need to find the right trade-off between ever increasing service demands and the quality standards, production costs and costs of delivery. Top performers worldwide agree that efficient supply chain strategies are effective drivers for sustainable growth.

This leads to numerous challenges:

• Creation of resilient supply chains
• Alignment of corporate and procurement strategies
• Reducing total cost of ownership of goods and products
• Supply base optimisation, stronger collaboration with suppliers
• Reducing quality and schedule shortfalls, harmonising quality processes, methods and tools
• Obtain optimum cost for inventory, secure cost of ownership for spare parts

Finally, to increase market share in low labour-cost countries and emerging economies, we will need to:

• Develop production and warehousing capabilities throughout the world
• Develop local sources (raw materials and equipments) and support them in complying with quality and delivery ratios
• Securing technology and manufacturing capabilities transfers

What is the Supply Chain offer in PLM ?

Throughout the lifecycle of a product, the management of its supply chain is key to enhance its profitability and service reliability. For new product releases, it has to be flexible to adapt to eventual late design changes and to reduce as possible the time to market.

For on-the-shelf products, they need to be robust and constantly seek for drivers to reduce costs while maintaining customer service levels. Moreover, products’ configurations often evolve after their release and supply chain needs to quickly reconfigure to prevent loss of sales due to product unavailability. Finally, for long-term in-service products the supply chain needs to be secured to guarantee the availability of spare parts.

Our supply chain performance solutions combine our engineering and supply chain know-how and skills in 4 major offers:

• Supply Chain Organisation
• Procurement Performance
• Logistics Performance
• Supply Chain Quality and Risks

They complete the end-to-end lifecycle management approach within our PLM solution by assuring the effectiveness in the manufacture and build, distribute and support domains.

What does this Group solution bring to Altran’s clients?

The wide scope approach of our PLM solution allows for supply chain requirements to be taken into account from the innovation phase and throughout the product development, launch, and afterlife phases. This approach makes it possible for effective and flexible supply chain strategies to be conceived, thus allowing for the supply chain to be a profitability driver rather than a cost centre.

Altran customers benefit from our transnational supply chain capabilities which allow us to rapidly set international teams with the capacity to define the best supply chain concepts, implement them and manage operations on behalf of our customers.

Finally, they benefit from a comprehensive cross-industry experience that enables us to provide them with valuable cross-industry benchmark. Our customers are thus able to implement best-in class supply chains solutions customised to their specific challenges and needs.