The automotive industry is no stranger to technology. It’s also no stranger to the rapid pace of change that’s overtaken global manufacturing in the early 21st-century. And when it comes to planning and organizing your entire automotive supply chain, advanced planning and scheduling (APS) is the key that will unlock increased ROI and decreased lag times. APS represents a sea change from traditional methods that looked at materials and production capacity as separate things, a view that often led to incompatible plans. Adoption rates of APS in the automotive sector are on the rise, paralleling the rise of make-to-order and additive manufacturing; and the increasing complexity of the automotive manufacturing world as a whole. And it’s that last factor that we’re going to focus on today, the increasing complexity of the automotive world and how APS can help. Whether by assisting with inventory leveling or by helping planners better schedule materials deliveries, APS can be a boon at every stage of the automotive manufacturing supply chain.

Let’s says you’re playing chess. Traditionally, a chess player looks at the whole board and comes up with an overarching strategy, which she can then adjust as needed when new conditions (i.e. her opponent's strategies and maneuvers) emerge. For this game, however, you decide to do something different: you have a series of different plans, one for the pawns, one for the bishops, one for the queen, etc. with no obvious connections or interplay between them. As situations arise in which multi-step, cross-functional movements would be helpful, you stay in your lane and stick to the separate plans for each function. At the end of the game, your rooks have performed admirably, and everything went according to plan for your pawns, but you still found yourself in checkmate.

Supply and demand are the first two concepts that most people learn about with regard to economics—and they’re also two of the most crucial elements of any manufacturing supply chain. In order to effectively meet customer demand, you need to ensure that you have enough supply on hand; and in order to profit by that demand, you have to make sure that your supply doesn’t wildly exceed your needs. As with so many things in manufacturing, this is easier said than done.

Even manufacturers themselves may sometimes forget how tremendous the global manufacturing sector really is. Manufacturing in the U.S. on its own, for instance, would be in the world’s top 10 economies. Because this sector encompasses so many different businesses with so many different missions and products, it’s easy to prove or disprove almost any prediction. Sure, someone among the incredibly diverse array of global electronics producers is probably using voice activated AI in their plants—just as someone else is probably bucking every emerging trend by continuing to eschew digitization and connectivity. Still, as general trends emerge, it can be helpful to identify and understand them. To that end, here are some predictions for the world of global manufacturing in 2020.

In our last look at Logistics 4.0 statistics, we discussed 5 that we feel will help define the shipping and logistics sector in the coming years. Today, we’re going to add to that list with 5 numbers we feel might be getting short shrift in coverage of this arena. Logistics is undergoing a collection of disruptions that seem to have hit out of the blue. There’s a seeming tsunami of dissatisfied customers, rising fuel costs, and global weather pattern changes, to name but a few. In order to respond appropriately, the shippers of the world have had to pivot, fast. Many are choosing to dive headfirst into the emerging world of Industry 4.0 technologies that promise to help predict at least some of these disruptions far enough in advance that alternative plans can be set in motion. Among the technologies seeing increasing adoption are AI, machine learning, RPA, and IoT. These technologies, combined with intelligent deployment tactics, are already having a big impact on the global supply chain. 

Logistics 4.0 is an offshoot of the larger trend in manufacturing known as Industry 4.0. Think of it as being to the supply chain what Industry 4.0 is to the factory, and you’ll begin to see the potential for massive disruption (of the good kind). As such, there is considerable overlap in the technologies at play. For example, the same IoT sensors that are revolutionizing preventative maintenance on the production line are also revolutionizing how the purchasing department determines what supplies to order. And the ability to automate production processes is being mirrored in the way those orders are being placed and the shipments themselves are being handled when they arrive. With the arrival of smart pallets, shelves, trucks, containers—even entire warehouses—logistics providers are able to create complete transparency up and down the value chain.

Let's say you’re a bartender in a sleepy neighborhood pub in your city. Your place might reasonably be called a dive bar, and you have a handful of regulars who come and order basically the same drinks week after week. As a result, your ordering process for restocking the bar is extremely simple. With little variation, you expect to go through predictable quantities of gin, tonic, bourbon, and cheap beer every month, and you’ve simply placed a standing order with the local distribution company to restock these things in the same quantity every so often. Life is pretty easy.

Let’s say it’s the day after Thanksgiving, and you’re trying to see how far you can stretch your leftovers. You take a good hard look at the fridge, where you note that given the amount of turkey, some mashed potatoes, some cranberry sauce, etc., you could probably put together another 6 person-meals for your family of 5. One of your family members, however, is a vegetarian, which means that any meals you put together for them can’t have any turkey or gravy. As such, they’ll need additional yams and mashed potatoes, which affects the proportions of the other plates that have to be assembled.

Lean manufacturing is a topic of choice these days. Discussions abound on everything from what works and what doesn’t, to how to make what’s not working work for you, to how to implement each individual segment of a lean architecture in a particular niche of the manufacturing world. That’s not our goal today. Instead, we want to cover one specific piece of the lean puzzle—every part every interval, or EPEI. We want to ensure you have a clear picture of this methodology, what it is and isn’t, whether it’s something you should consider implementing at your factory, and, finally, how Industry 4.0 is affecting its place in the value chain. Many of the issues addressed below are applicable to lean manufacturing more widely, so you can take the information presented and apply it to your situation and see how emerging technology might help your bottom line.

All the way at the far end of the supply chain, when an automobile reaches its end consumer, it looks like they’re buying one large item. But automotive manufacturers know differently—they know that each car on the road is really comprised of about 20,000 different parts, and all of them had to come from somewhere. After being sourced, they had to be stored, allocated for various production plans, brought to the production plant, and assembled into a road-worthy vehicle that someone could drive off the lot at their local car dealership.