Design New Supply Chains
In the supply chains for complex engineering projects, it is typical for 75% of the deliverables to come from sub-contractors or partners, each of whom manages their own share of the project risk, but generally each party does not communicate enough about supply chain risks. This makes it impossible, easily, to identify all the potential weak links and opportunities for improvement.
Plexus is the solution. It helps integrate the diverse perspectives of engineering, commercial, purchase, manufacturing, logistics and other factors across the whole supply chain.
Systematic Definition of what must be sourced
Plexus starts by building up a systematic list of what must be sourced, which acts as the route map to get information from RFI/RFP, data and to evaluate alternative suppliers and strategies. Plexus may be used for own manufactured or OEM parts & subassemblies and for services and support infrastructure. Activities may take place in multiple countries and locations and often include the country of the customer.
Central Model to structure Sourcing Options
Plexus is a centrally maintained supply chain model that, eliminates the unstructured mass of separate spreadsheets previously used, and pulls everything together in a single model that supports multiple tiers of information and allows drill down to the detailed value streams, project plans, processes to evaluate alternatives, risk and opportunities.
The model is created by starting from your corporate supply chain data such as: approved & potential suppliers; internal work centres; lists of commodity & material groups, together with work in progress definitions from the BOM and then used to create standard networks for the supply chain
Easily Characterise and review Alternate Strategies
The power of Plexus is how it allows you to visualise and analyse the whole supply chain value stream, however complex. Plexus clearly shows: the number of hand-offs; various cost elements; cumulative mileage; lead-time; ROM inventory for given production rates; visualised geographical flow; risk ( supplier maturity on each alternate path); single points of failure; currency exposure, and much more.
Many processes are automated, so that to change a vendor or other user defined attribute of the supply chain, the model is updated in real-time with, for example: locations; mileage; costs; work in progress; risk.
Multiple views enable easy supply chain visualisation:
Inform, Justify, Audit and Communicate, Sourcing decisions and Value Stream Design
The model contains all the data needed to show the different alternatives that were considered and to justify the business approach.
It shows each alternative, the sourcing decision points, and the requirements from the RFI and RFP. It records the decision making process, which options were chosen / eliminated and the rationale for the proposed supply chain.