Plexus Planning. Plexus - Mastering Complex Aerospace and Defense Supply Chains

(1)

Plexus™ - Mastering Complex Aerospace and

Defense Supply Chains

(2)

Benefits

 Increased Inventory Turns (release hundreds of millions of dollars)

 Improved Customer Satisfaction (Delivery)  Increased Profit Margin  Increased Turnover

Big Picture Visualization and

Quantification of the Supply Chain with

Plexus

For aerospace and defense organizations, complex products mean

complex supply chains.

Where prime contractors used to manufacture 75% of deliverables

in-house, this situation has now reversed, with risk-sharing partners

managing 75% of the supply chain.

These supply chains are under increasing pressure to respond to

customer flexibility linked with ever faster product and change cycles.

To compound this, substantial innovation responsibility has also been

pushed to partners. Together, these factors make it imperative to

integrate the diverse perspectives of engineering, commercial, purchase,

manufacturing & logistics across the extended enterprise.

Against this background, few primes can map the entirety of their supply

chains, and primes and subcontractors do not communicate sufficiently

about supply chain risks. In these conditions, it is impossible to identify

potential weak links and opportunities for improvement.

Plexus ensures organizations see the big picture and realize huge

financial benefits in the extended supply chain, as part of a concerted

effort to up-skill and up-tool a relatively small number of people over a

short time period.

For instance, an OEM can aim to release hundreds of millions of

dollars for re-investment by significantly increasing its inventory turns as

a result of design, analysis and action by using Plexus.

Existing supply chains can also be reworked in partnership with

suppliers. When you solve the inventory turnover issue, everyone

benefits in real terms. Your suppliers are enabled to produce and deliver

materials in a timely, low-cost fashion that allows you to minimize your

inventory and cost of materials, while elevating your supplier’s

competitiveness as a business.

But you can’t improve what you cannot see. Plexus is unparalleled in its

ability to rapidly extract and exploit whole program

Value Stream Maps

from existing Bill of Material (BOM) data and supply chain experts. This

removes the need for laborious mapping in traditional tools like Excel™,

PowerPoint™ and Visio™. Plexus shares these maps as live

visualizations for collaborative working.

By providing

Value Stream Mapping

in an economical, widely-used and

understood tool, Plexus motivates and empowers people to see the big

picture and use analytics to rapidly measure quality of different options,

and then optimize targeted improvements.

(3)

Q: What are Value Stream

Maps?

A: All the steps required to bring a

product or service from a raw state

through to the customer

Plexus vastly accelerates Value Stream Mapping, which is a powerful technique that allows clients to create a “big picture” visual representation of:

 All the steps in the process, working back from customer demand to raw material

 The flow of both material and information, and the effects they have on each other

 Implications for meeting the customer’s requirements  Data that informs sourcing decisions, factory design and

flow, and more.

Value Stream Engineering

Rapidly constructing value stream maps with Plexus releases your organization’s potential to design and engineer supply chains to meet customer and business requirements. This results in optimum-total-cost and lowest-risk solutions.

This can be done on a program-by-program basis, or across a global supply chain, benefitting the whole enterprise.

Measures of success

Financial metrics (including increased Inventory Turns, balanced by improved Customer Satisfaction) correlate closely to successful deployment of Plexus.

For a large OEM, hundreds of millions of USD can be released through a value stream approach to designing and re-engineering supply chains.

Revenue and profit margin also increase as order backlogs reduce; productivity increases, input costs decrease, cash is re-invested, etc.

Insights for creating Lean supply

chains

Plexus works best in a concerted program to up-skill and empower the people that have the greatest influence on the shape of the supply chain. Plexus can be the catalyst for this business change.

Seeing and relentlessly removing the ‘7 forms of waste’ is where it begins: over-production, defects, unnecessary inventory, inappropriate processing, excessive transportation, waiting, and unnecessary motion. Plexus provides the necessary insights to:

 Identify and combine messy, deep or low volume supply chains to achieve economies of scale, better agility, and better communication

 Reduce complexity, where contracts-within-contracts-within-contracts induce unnecessary middle man costs (e.g., DFAR 252.215 Excessive Pass-Through Charges)

 Avoid “monopolizing” suppliers, threats to sovereignty of supply, export control, and geopolitical risks  Ensure appropriate work-share within free trade

structures

 Avoid excessive logistics costs (e.g., inventory storage costs, or shipping costs for low value added steps in geographically distributed processes

 Achieve harmonization of flow times and sequence where it matters

Plexus reveals waste

Plexus lets users see the flow of material from different perspectives including time (e.g., critical path).

Plexus shows the user structural inconsistencies that relate to potential waste (e.g., fragmentation of organizations, contract structures, activity locations etc.). It also acts as a hub to marry together data from disparate sources, including subject matter experts, who can visualize and communicate their parts of the supply chain far better in a picture than in tables generated from a database. With sophisticated filtering, searching, reporting and visualization techniques, Plexus users can examine any model deeply, without becoming overwhelmed by complexity. Coupled with Plexus’ data sharing capabilities, data managed in other systems can be imported, viewed, analyzed, edited graphically, and communicated.

(4)

Figure 1 Supply chain process view – e.g., how the engineer sees it

Figure 2 Supply chain supplier view – e.g., who has responsibility

Figure 3 Supply chain contract view – e.g., where is the value, and where are the middle men?

Figure 4 Supply chain location views (expanded and

Figure 5 Supply chain filtered to the critical path and grouped by contract. This Gantt view is synchronized with the network view, and its roll-up structure can be set to any of the Grouping Hierarchies - e.g., by location, by supplier, by product structure breakdown, etc.

Creating Value Stream Maps

in Plexus

By working with blue chip clients, Plexus has perfected a turn-key approach and tool to create value stream maps for new and existing products:

 Auto generate Supply Chain Maps from existing BOM data

 Assign suppliers, and lookup locations (and other grouping hierarchies)

 Substitute parts in the Supply Chain Maps with their Value Stream activities

 Annotate the map with further supply chain data Plexus leverages existing data held in spreadsheets, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems to automatically generate the Supply Chain Map. This is a dependency network of parts, kits and assemblies that describes the build sequence from delivery, working upstream to the raw materials or basic components.

The Supply Chain Map is a valuable intermediate artefact on the way to producing the Value Stream Map: it is completed by assigning parts to suppliers, locations, and other grouping hierarchies. This information is generally available from ERP and purchasing systems. Where such data exists and is structured, this process can be

(5)

functionality to add the Value Stream activities for parts in the Supply Chain Map. This makes transitioning from Supply Chain Map to Value Stream Map possible, and in very short order. By being selective about which parts to deep-dive, and which to keep at part level, you don’t waste effort on modelling that doesn’t add value, while keeping the big-picture.

One can then annotate the map with further supply chain data: Plexus is configurable, and the fields relevant to a Value Stream (such as flow, cost (value added), price (contract value), transportation, sustainability, logistics, etc.) can be configured by the user. Data I/O from external systems and in-tool editing of this data is efficient. Crucially, data captured in Plexus is accessible for external analysis in other tools. This allows any ad hoc computation available in external tools (Excel, etc.) to be performed on structured data in Plexus.

Technical Advantages

Architecture and scalability

Plexus is a database and server application, for collaboration and data security. It is accessed over a network by rich clients that provide unparalleled visualization, editing, and analysis of large, complex networks of dependency.

Plexus scales to deal with massive networks (e.g., whole product supply chains with hundreds of thousands of parts), while being intuitive to use for small analyses.

Collaborative knowledge elicitation

Executive systems never contain all the data needed for value stream mapping. Early in the design process such data may not exist, data may come from the sub-tiers, and late in the process, data may be fragmented or simply unmanaged. Consequently, eliciting real knowledge from individuals is always necessary. Plexus provides unparalleled collaborative, networked editing to complement importing data from other systems.

Options and what-if modeling analysis,

and optimization

Designing, and re-working supply chains involves options and decisions. Plexus represents alternative paths (with their own unique activities, flow times, costs, suppliers, transport to the next steps in the chain, etc). Because each path’s inclusion is a parameter, alternatives can be evaluated. Sophisticated Plexus optimization techniques can be used to find the best alternatives.

A collaborative workshop to elicit boxes and arrows knowledge. Plexus is a server-based system that can be accessed by Plexus’s rich client across a network.

Plexus Offering

Let Plexus give your organization a turn-key ability to produce, engineer, and exploit Value Stream Maps on a large scale.

This will accelerate identification of waste; prioritize action, and help embed continuous improvement across your global production system.

Communication will improve; supply chain risk exposure will reduce (on many fronts), and everyone, including your suppliers and customers, will benefit. Crucially, measurable financial metrics (like Inventory Turns, Customer

Satisfaction, Profit Margin and Revenue) will increase as a direct result of the initiatives Plexus catalyses.

About Us

We help blue chip Aerospace and Defense companies deal with complex networks of dependency that require large investments, and need to be effective and efficient.

Contact

Plexus Planning Limited University Gate East Park Row, Clifton Bristol BS1 5UB United Kingdom +44 845 643 9640 [email protected] www.Plexusplanning.com