About Collaborative Enterprise Sourcing

Background. In today's competitive environment, manufacturing organizations need to streamline processes and collaborate efficiently across global value chains. The manufacturing organizations need to break down operational silos within their enterprises, manage processes that introduce risk, and focus on strategies which can rapidly engineer products for the market at lower costs. A critical factor in meeting these objectives is streamlining supply chain processes to accelerate and improve decision making.

Objective: For many organizations, integrating sourcing considerations early on and throughout the product design process is becoming a business priority. "Designing with supply in mind" reduces development time and costs, improves product quality, and helps foster cost-effective design innovation. However, to realize these benefits, engineers need sourcing data and constraints readily available on their desktops; sourcing needs accurate 3D product data; and both need access to the latest enterprise resource information from product concept through retirement. ENOVIA CES makes sourcing an integral component of the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system rather than an isolated function considered after design is completed.

Design for Supply: With ENOVIA CES, engineers can launch sourcing tools from their desktops, seamlessly connected with applications that maintain, analyze, and update key supplier data. Engineers and managers can collaborate in real time with sourcing specialists as the product matures. As a result, issues are discovered and handled more efficiently and designs go into production more rapidly, reducing time to value.

With advanced search capabilities and attribute views on price, obsolescence, supplier information, and preferred manufacturers, engineers can quickly locate and validate the right parts to optimize current designs. Access to this rich sourcing data promotes re-use of approved and optimized parts, dramatically increasing the quality and reducing the quantity of managed parts. In addition to facilitating reuse, ENOVIA CES helps organizations pro-actively monitor and reduce risk when introducing new parts. Ultimately, ENOVIA CES helps organizations produce higher-quality products with fewer warranty and repair issues, especially when proven parts are re-used for new or updated products.

Supply for Design: Using ENOVIA CES, sourcing can engage in the early stages of design to proactively supply for products. Armed with "pre-rank prioritization" lists of suppliers and manufacturers, engineers can leverage supplier relationships and approved parts to improve decision making. Users can take critical factors such as price and lead-time into account as part of the engineering process. Additionally, they can analyze information as to where and how parts are being used, and at what cost, to drive business strategies. This approach gives all stakeholders more and better information to control, introduce, and manage components within the enterprise and across the supply chain.

Crossing the Data Divide: A major obstacle to achieving "design for supply, supply for design" efficiency is the data disconnect between design and sourcing information and applications. Engineers work with one system for design and product data, while sourcing uses another to perform reviews and determine supplier parts. With ENOVIA CES, the two datasets are integrated into a single environment, eliminating the need to reconcile data across domains or manage multiple islands of catalog data.

The ENOVIA CES Enterprise Catalog provides a single master of parts, accessible from the PLM system and available to all functional groups and stakeholders. For example, engineers can refer to the master catalog to perform context-specific searches or comparisons across 3D and sourcing attributes, then instantiate parts directly into assemblies. Stakeholders can utilize the approved vendor list or approved part list to reference and classify components within the catalog, review details on specific parts, or consider alternatives based on price, materials, obsolescence, preferred suppliers, and manufacturers. Meanwhile, if sourcing changes the preferences or pricing, or adds parts, the information can be shared immediately across systems and users, no matter how complex or dynamic.

In large manufacturing organizations, where complex family structures using hundreds of parts are commonplace, management quickly becomes complicated and optimization almost impossible. ENOVIA CES leverages proven industry methods and technologies to help customers manage parts multi-dimensionally across programs, manufacturers, and supplier sites. For example, a single component can belong to a part family, participate in multiple programs, be procured and used by multiple sites, and each use a different supplier and manufacturer. For OEMs and their global supply chains, the ENOVIA CES Enterprise Catalog combines the sourcing knowledge and tools to deliver rapid return on their development investment.

Comprehensive Component Management Process: ENOVIA CES provides a comprehensive set of management processes to coordinate sourcing functions across domains and reduce risk. The New Product Introduction workflow process, for example, helps define a standard process for introducing new parts into the enterprise catalog. With ENOVIA CES as the integrated sourcing system for the enterprise, organizations can build better products at reduced cost, manage compliance and regulatory issues, leverage offshore sourcing capabilities, and respond quickly and effectively to competitive challenges.