The European industry is confronted with a number of key challenges:
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Globalise their supply chain while controlling costs and service
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Deliver ever-more customized and up-to-date products to a psychologically ever more individualized and self-aware customer.
And yet, the current state-of-the-art from a process and systems perspective does not match these challenges.
We believe a key opportunity lies in leveraging recent evolutions in Information and Communication Technology. Technologies like ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), APS (Advanced Planning and Scheduling), MES (Manufacturing Execution System), WMS (Warehouse Management System) provide a wealth of data typically through data warehouses. The ECLIPS Proposal will help to distil key knowledge from this data abundance. Technologies like the internet allow easy and real-time transmission data around the world. This ECLIPS Proposal will help to convert this real-time information in supply chain value.
ECLIPS aims to provide breakthrough research and development spanning both the academic and the business state-of-the-art.
The key theme is multi-echelon supply chain optimization at tactical level, spanning the full life cycle of a product. Multi-echelon optimization is currently very poorly supported from a process and technology perspective and promises considerable cost reductions.
Companies are struggling with the multi-echelon dimension of product introductions and retreats. With the ever increasing product diversification and shortening life-cycles, companies are in need of a breakthrough innovation. A key problem is forecasting.Current forecasting techniques work well for the mature phase but poorly support the introduction and end-of-life phases. For mature products, we believe that using multi-level cyclic planning will support a breakthrough innovation. Multi-level cyclic planning is the cruise control of supply chain planning.
As the pace of product introductions increases and life cycles shorten, an automated switching between the optimal supply chain control mechanisms is a key challenge for the supply chain systems of the future.
Our belief is that these breakthroughs allow supply chain inventory reductions of 30%. The broad applicability of the developed concepts make that this is a very promising element in enhancing the competitiveness of the European Industry. The combined strengths of the consortium partners will allow a translation of these academic level concepts into a software package that can easily be added on existing ERP and APS packages. The add-on concept will in itself assure the broad applicability and exploitation of this development
