The Covid-19 pandemic continues to cause huge disruption, while Brexit has upended cross-Channel trade. The blockage of the Suez Canal last month added yet more chaos into the mix.
The myriad challenges are mirrored by rapid innovation and new ways of working at companies in all stages of the supply chain. Technologies such as 3D printing and digital manufacturing are maturing and being increasingly adopted around the world.
The stage was perfectly set, then, for the first Manufacturing Insights webinar, hosted by Professional Engineering in association with Protolabs. Designed to help IMechE members and engineering leaders futureproof their organisations, the series kicked off earlier this month with ‘Supply chain flexibility – expert insight for engineers’.
Chaired by Professional Engineering’s content development director Matthew Rock, the speakers were Ted Wiggans, chairman of Evince Technology and former chairman of the IMechE manufacturing division, David Ewing, EMEA CNC product manager at Protolabs, and Steve Lewis-Brammer, northern European sales director for Protolabs.
Throughout the session, the experts discussed some of the best ways to enhance supply chain flexibility. Here are five of their top tips.
Prepare for the unexpected
“In war, I find plans to be useless and planning to be invaluable,” said Wiggans, quoting General Eisenhower.
“Things go wrong all the time,” Wiggans continued. “All this stuff happens, and in my mind… you have to address this with planning. No-one knows your business better than you.”
The sentiment was shared by all speakers, who urged companies to thoroughly prepare for all eventualities to keep supply chains running efficiently.
Protolabs’ swift contribution to Mercedes AMG and UCL’s project building CPAP systems for Covid-19 patients was a striking example. The firm’s preparation and agile set-up allowed it to manufacture three different tools using injection moulding, delivering 10,000 parts over 14 days.
“We stock a lot of raw material and we stock a lot of machine capacity, so we do have that to hand and available to cover changes in situations,” said Ewing.
“Unlike many suppliers who are fully optimised for utilising the machines to 100%, we’re rather more optimised for maintaining supply. We want to optimise our machines to use them as fully as possible, with technology that enables us to meet both of those objectives quite well – so we carry some spare capacity, but we also run quite efficiently.”
Frequent and detailed communication with suppliers is key when planning ahead, said Lewis-Brammer. “Talk to the supply chain,” he said. “Try and understand where they see the future going, what sort of trends they think are going to happen and how they are preparing for them. Because for lots of us, we tend to look at supply chain in terms of a reactive approach – but what about proactive?
“Because I think businesses are changing so rapidly now… disruptions will only continue to occur, and will probably happen more frequently.”
‘You can be too lean’
Lean manufacturing is celebrated for its focus on minimising waste and maximising productivity – but it can be taken too far, said Ewing.
“You can be too lean,” he said. “There’s the old joke that just-in-time is just-too-late, so in Protolabs one of the main things we do is we carry more stock than perhaps we might be able to get away with, and that’s to cover a lot of the different contingencies. So we’re stocking many materials in many different grades and sizes.”
Stocking that extra material still enables the principles of lean, he continued. Designers know they can iterate quickly, and they can depend on Protolabs to deliver in a day or two, allowing design changes that could make a big difference to product lifecycle costs.
Get down to the factory floor
Modern software and sensors provide previously unprecedented levels of information about machines and their inner workings. Sometimes, the old ways can be best, however – even if lockdowns make them impractical.
“You can’t beat standing on a line trying to solve a problem,” said Wiggans. “Hearing the noise of the machinery, seeing things happening and being able to understand what’s going on. And it’s been desperately challenging [during the pandemic].”
One solution is making sure you have people in manufacturing facilities throughout the supply chain. “It’s much better to have someone on the ground, if you can afford it. If you can’t afford it… then have somebody in your supplier who is dedicated to you, and ideally have an engineer, a process engineer – somebody who can help solve problems for you.”
As Lewis-Brammer added, “relationships are key.” Supplier engineers can locate and identify issues that weren’t initially obvious, feeding back information and changing plans if needed.
Avoid single-source supply
“I hate single-source supply,” said Wiggans. “There are times when you have no options but to single source supply – you’re over a barrel, you’re absolutely caught by the supplier then, and anything can happen. And in my lifetime, anything has happened.”
Relying on a single supplier might mean a material suddenly becoming unavailable after the supplier’s stock is bought up by another manufacturer, for example.
“I would never single source supply, unless you have absolutely no option,” said Wiggans.
Embrace modern manufacturing to ‘onshore’ production
High-value products can and should be onshored, said Wiggans, especially for low- and medium-volume manufacturing. Modern techniques can be particularly helpful for companies aiming to do so.
“Anybody following Industry 4.0 knows that there’s lots of technologies available to help you do that, not least additive manufacturing, hybrid manufacturing… CNC combined with additive.”
‘Supply chain flexibility – expert insight for engineers’ is now available on demand. Visit the IMechE webinar site to view the session.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.