I want to point out an interesting post I recently read in the SpendMatters blog. If you are keen on sourcing and supply-chain issues, I highly recommend checking out this blog and some of the articles and posts published in it.
The post I refer to is called “Drive Innovation Using Collaborative Supplier Relationships” and it was published in 2 parts in the following links:
In this post, writers Joshua Nelson and Benjamin Werner talk about creating innovation and gaining competitive advantage in today’s market place, where market factors like shrinking product lifecycles, globalization and economic volatility make this more challenging than before. Nelson and Werner indicate that the traditional innovation model does not adapt to these new challenges. Companies that continue to focus only on internal R&D resources for concept, design, test and commercialization, and in parallel relying on sourcing processes that focus on traditional metrics like price, will not be able to sustain an innovation advantage.
According to Nelson and Werner, in order to broaden the innovation pipeline and speed up the innovation process, companies must employ collaborative innovation processes with supply chain partners. Collaboration with supply chain partners delivers numerous benefits to companies, including:
- Access to knowledge, technology, or capacity that has already been developed externally
- The focus of internal resources on specific core competencies; additional core competencies can be obtained by collaborating with supply chain partners
- Leveraging pre-existing supply partner capabilities increases speed-to-market cycle times
- Reduced project risk driven by decreased knowledge building, testing, and capital requirements
The first step for companies is to develop an innovation strategy based on their business priorities and objectives for each of their product categories. After the strategy is defined, companies can start building the framework and processes for innovation collaboration with supply-chain partners.
If you attended one of our “collaborative sourcing” sessions in the latest Dassault Systèmes 3DExperience forum in Orlando, you already saw that we can help you in implementing a supplier collaboration innovation strategy. The Dassault Systèmes 3DExperience platform, with the ENOVIA applications for sourcing and supplier collaboration, provide customers with the key technical infrastructure and tools to establish supply-chain partner collaboration in early stages of the product lifecycle to increase the innovation throughput of the company.
It will be interesting to hear your views on this topic, if you already implemented an innovation strategy with collaboration partners, or if you are planning to create one, let me know if you want to hear more about what Dassault Systèmes can do to help you with supplier collaboration. We will be happy to meet with you and share our vision and capabilities.
Thanks,
Eran
