Written by dudaAugust 8, 2023

Overlooked value potential with Supplier Integration

Supplier integration plays a crucial role in achieving operational excellence, driving innovation, reducing costs, and consequently improving customer satisfaction with better results. By building strong relationships and integrating suppliers into business processes, companies can create a competitive advantage in today’s dynamic and complex business environment. The Scandinavian Digital team, expert in Supplier Integration implementation presents a “6 value areas” diagram, where supplier integration values areas divided in Lead Time, Cost Transparency, Cost of Quality, Cost of Hours, Project Time and Partnerships.

Scandinavian Digital Supplier Integration 6 Value Areas

To comment on the values, we invited our CFO Christian Andersen, key player to these 6 areas to be established as our value areas. Starting with Lead Time, he explains as: “Supplier integration will significantly reduce lead time by streamlining product specification and procurement processes, enabling seamless configuration and ordering, and improving communication with the supplier, resulting in faster project turnaround and enhanced operational efficiency.” 

Continuing talking about the areas, Cost of Transparency stands out as a very important one since it becomes easier to compare prices based on your needs. In addition, it becomes much easier to discover and compare various solutions. If they from a technical point of view, all are according to the requirements, then the optimal choice have the lowest cost since additional overperformance, or oversizing will only add extra cost to the project the end customer initially did not ask for. Still talking about cost but with the focus on quality, Christian adds: “Uniform information leads to fewer errors in a configurator environment, resulting in a better cost of quality.” The last cost area that we talk about in our values is the Cost of Hours, since automating repetitive tasks facilities better utilization of the team, it is possible to focus on more value adding tasks while avoiding unformal procedures that may lead to the loss of critical information. As our CFO says: “Secure and structured flow of information bring back faster results”.

The fifth value area, Project Timing, is a consequence of the previous areas. With shorter Lead Time, better transparency of cost, lower errors on the cost of product, reduced use of Hours and Partnerships, the Project managers will experience a solid foundation for delivering large and complex project on time, as specified by end customer and within the agree time.  

The partnerships are a great way to end all of the areas and no further explication is needed as Christian states: Supplier integration fosters stronger partnerships by improving collaboration, enhancing communication, and facilitating a seamless exchange of information and resources, leading to mutual growth, increased business opportunities, and improved overall efficiency.

 

Christian Andersen, Scandinavian Digital’s Senior Partner and Chief Financial Officer


The concept from Scandinavian Digital is to be a facilitator between manufactures, product– and project companies, and suppliers offering a platform for both vendor and buyer.  The use of web API’s helps to provide a secure and centralized space for sharing information, conducting transactions, and collaborating on various activities. It’s possible to facilitate communication, document sharing, and real-time updates on order status, delivery schedules, and product specifications.

In this environment, suppliers can switch roles with manufacturers. After all, often the supplier requires technical information to create or assemble their product before bringing it to market. We can say that this type of platform is a two-way street that can be highly beneficial for long-lasting partnerships with a good cost-benefit ratio, low lead time, high quality, and minimal errors in the process due to automation.

Our CFO, Christian Andersen, responsible for leading many of the supplier integrations projects signed by our team makes sure to state what the SD team brings to the table, “In a certain way we broader the market for the companies as well as for the suppliers. We display their products in an easier way to the right target group. And consequently, the more complex the product is, the more work can be automated and less errors made in the entire process.”

 Another important part of Supplier Integration is the Advanced Analytics and Reporting, since data provide valuable insights into supplier performance, supply chain risks, and cost optimization opportunities. “Supplier integration is one of the most overlooked areas to reduce lead time and costs of goods in projects companies.” this is a statement of our CFO, reaffirming that Supplier Integration is a must to enhance end to end processes in projects, especially considering that it is very often overlooked or not solved in large companies since is require top-management buy-in for the end-to-end process optimization.

With Supplier Integration projects for products like gears, elevators, fans, filters, and hydraulics listed in our curriculum, it becomes evident to our team that Supplier Integration has the potential becoming a game changer within and beyond an organization. For that reason, it’s important with top-management buy-in in order to avoid sub-optimization in individual departments. For that reason, Scandinavian Digital have developed a well-proven framework to safeguard, the integration project offers a multitude of advantages, primarily by effectively connecting individuals with their specific needs in a trustworthy environment for both sides. 

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Written by dudaJune 12, 2023

What happens after the implementation of Engineering & Design Automation?

We have been talking a lot about all the benefits the companies can achieve and how would be to implement EDA (Engineering & Design Automation). However, one of the hot topics at the moment is: What comes after EDA (Engineering & Design Automation) is implemented in a company? We interview our Lead Engineer, Jan Petersen, he oversees many of our Engineering and Design Automation implementation projects and its ready to give his overview on the topic.

Jan Petersen is the Lead-Engineer at Scandinavian Digital

Q – The number one questions is: what will happen with the workforce since the execution hours are reduced?

Jan Petersen – This is always the first question! EDA (Engineering & Design Automation) is changing the focus of the product owner away from standard order execution, towards innovation and development. Because the standard orders are handled by EDA, the time freed up will be redirected to product care with both the continuous maintenance of the configurator, data and rules, and development of the future features.

Q –  Can you develop more on the benefits after the implementation?

Jan Petersen – Yes, order execution normally has a hard time scaling fast according to the order backlog, with EDA (Engineering & Design Automation) it is now possible to handle more orders with the same size team or smaller. The result is a cost reduction because it is now possible to scale the throughput without needing adjustments to the execution team. Reducing the execution time also leads to a subsequent reduction in lead-time.

When implementing EDA (Engineering & Design Automation) you are digitalizing the product rules and design to increase the repeatability of the documentation and consequently have less errors. This is possible as new projects are generated from one master model, this mitigates wrong calculations and mistakes on the design when doing a manual execution.

In conclusion… with continuous product enhancement, based on the feedback from orders executed, you will keep improving your products and handle new orders with reduced need for engineering solutions for these orders. A long term benefit for example, is energy optimization.

Q – How does this impact other parts of a company?

Jan Petersen – The initial impact will be the reduced need for the product owner or group in relation to orders. After launching there will be a transition period where the new setup will be tested and adjusted to ensure future order handling will flow unimpeded. On the longer-term Sales will be impacted as more focus will be on improving the product and ensuring the product portfolio fits the market needs.

Q – How are customer projects impacted?

Jan Petersen – Speed! Customers, both internal and external, will get orders faster due to the heavily reduced execution time. The sales teams will have faster response times and be able to capitalize on this to have a reduced delivery schedule. Having the delivery schedule shortened will impact all subsequent steps in the project and in the end, it should mean production will start earlier.

Q – What if the customer has special requests? For example, Customisation of the product.

Jan Petersen – The answer is: this can be handled through EDA (Engineering & Design Automation) as well! You will not have the full benefit of EDA (Engineering & Design Automation), however it is possible to directly use the parts where no change is made like for a standard project, focusing your engineering effort on the customized parts.

For example, if you need to change locally, like the in- or outlet on a product, you have configured to the closest configuration, make the changes and the rest of your product will retain full EDA.

Q –  How does this impact the management team?

Jan Petersen – In the immediate time after launching EDA (Engineering & Design Automation) product maintenance will be the key word. Setting up the owners and teams around EDA to handle feedback and getting procedures in place to implement the highest priority fixes and features.

Moving away from a firefighting mindset, into preventing the need for immediate fixes and implementing the fixes on the master model, will result in a more stable higher quality product. This will be noticed elsewhere in the organization from the people at site commissioning all the way through the quality department, project management and back to Engineering.

So Jan it’s possible to see enormous impact in different areas after implementing EDA. Do you believe that EDA (Engineering & Design Automation) implementation for big manufacturing companies is a must and if so, why?

Jan Petersen – From an engineering perspective definitely! You have competition and if you are competing with other companies delivering similar type of equipment you are measured on speed, price, and quality. With EDA you will be able to deliver high quality fast, the price will be less of a factor, since return of investment is reduced by the shortened time from order to commissioning. As a consequence, companies not implementing DA are more likely to become less competitive and have problems scaling their business.

Watch a shorter version of the full interview:

 

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Written by dudaMay 23, 2023

How to use Engineering & Design Automation to guarantee more sustainability and product quality in the Packaging Industry?

At Scandinavian Digital we are problem solvers. Our motto is: Anything can be configured. Our experts have never encountered an issue that couldn’t be resolved until now, this what our CTO Morten Bennick affirms. In the packaging industry, machinery manufacturing possess several challenges such as high costs, limited flexibility, frequent breakdowns, maintenance and repair difficulties, and integrating new technology. Other issues include low efficiency, slow production rates, and a lack of customisation options. Problems, which we can solve or reduce by using Engineering & Design Automation. 


Customisation is one of the greatest benefits of using EDA (Engineering & Design Automation), especially because we can configure a machine with exactly the client’s needs in mind, considering the product they work with and the production they need to achieve. In our six value areas when using Design Automation, we present benefits such as up to 88% reduction in lead time, an increase in sales up to 30% three years after implementing DA (Design Automation), not to mention the solution to one of the industry’s biggest complaints, which is costs. The cost reduction through product quality control is estimated to be up to 60%, referring to the amount of errors that are reduced and even completed eliminated.
 
Using Engineering & Design Automation helps clients to bring their product to the market faster as the same way contributes to deliver orders in a quicker way. Design automation helps companies bring products to the market faster by streamlining and accelerating the product development process. DA tools enable the automation of repetitive design tasks. By creating predefined rules and constrains. Using the integrated Tacton plug-in to CAD platforms as SolidWorks, PTC Creo and Autodesk Inventor,  the engineers can work in their preferred CAD environment. TDA Studio has the ability to generate only valid product variants, paramethic designs and the result is CAD models without errors. Through mapping configuration logic to your CAD parts, you can connect Tacton’s product configuration model to your CAD system’s parts and parameters. This ensures product integrity. The 2D drawings and the documentation as Bill of Material is created automatically in seconds.   

Design Automation allows different machinery customisation.


Correct sizing, another relevant theme already explained by our experts (Read more: Correct sizing is a critical point to cost reduction and sustainability in the manufacturing industry – Scandinavian Digital ) is another factor to reduce cost and improve sustainability in the packaging industry. After all, Sizing plays a crucial role in the manufacturing industry as it directly affects the quality and functionality of the final product. With an accurate sizing it is possible to reduce costs by minimizing waste and maximizing efficiency. On the other hand, incorrect sizing can result in waste, rework, and increased costs. This is a great way of reducing cost and creating a more sustainable process. 
 
We firmly believe that Engineering & Design Automation represents the essential next step for packaging manufacturers to accelerate industry innovation and proactively address existing challenges. Fortunately, we already possess the ideal solution to facilitate this necessary transition.  
 
Do you want to continue this conversation? Contact us: info@scandinaviandigital.com 

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