Accelerate Product Innovation and Improve the Supply Chain Starting with the Humble Product Part | EXALEAD

A sometimes-overlooked aspect of digital engineering and business transformation, improving product part development and sourcing offers many advantages, most notably strengthening your supply chain and accelerating product innovation.

Investing in the right technology and implementing best practices around parts significantly helps improve enterprise collaboration and visibility into the supply chain. Managing parts can cut costs and time-to-market.

Part Standardization Delivers Strong ROI

A leading radio frequency products and services provider sought to improve part reuse. Bird Technologies chose the OnePart search application for its mechanical engineering activities. “OnePart quickly searches through our design database based on file attributes, metadata and geometric similarities, enabling engineers to easily find similar parts,” says Marcus Aichinger, Corporate R&D Manager – Processes and Tools. Implementing OnePart allows Bird Technologies to leverage existing designs and reduces overall development time of new products, delivering a 75% reduction in duplicate parts with the potential to improve more. Using artificial intelligence to standardize parts and optimize reuse reaps savings and shortens development time. 

Optimize Part Sourcing and Your Supply Chain

Applying AI to part sourcing offers strong benefits for the supply chain.  A 2020 IDC paper on supply chain optimization reported, “54% of European manufacturers say their biggest supply chain gap is collaboration with suppliers.” With NETVIBES Sourcing & Standardization Intelligence solutions on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, engineering and procurement teams collaborate on complex parts sourcing decisions by optimizing supplier selection processes and finding alternative suppliers in case of supply chain disruptions. Linking engineering and purchasing data identifies similar or identical parts with different reference numbers and prices. This information helps drive quantity discounts and selection of preferred suppliers.

Find Qualified Parts Suppliers in One Centralized Place

Standard parts make up only 20% of the purchasing volume, but 80% of procurement costs. In order to optimize the purchasing process, decrease risks and costs, and keep product development on schedule, easy access to parts available from reliable external suppliers is critical. PartSupply is the most comprehensive, AI-driven catalog of sourceable 3D components. Available free of charge for companies of all sizes, its more than 1,000 on-demand content providers from around the world comprise a one-stop shop of tens of millions of qualified component configurations. The cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE Marketplace empowers users to iterate on design and manufacturing specifications, ensures that a part or product can be manufactured, and reduces risk and errors.

Reuse, Purchase or Design:  Artificial Intelligence Simplifies Part Decisions

AI makes it possible for companies to analyze part spend to make the best decision: reuse, purchase or design a new component. Especially in an era of uncertainty, the ability to quickly find any part, intelligently strategize procurement, and minimize supply chain complexities and risks is critical. Find out more and learn why companies need a savvy product part strategy to make smart data-driven decisions.

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