The Rules of Smarter, More Resilient Food Supply Chain Planning

Food supply chains are highly complex. Disruptions can occur at any time and can impact the security and livelihoods of people across the globe. Recently, we have seen how large, unexpected disruptions have brought new challenges and unimaginable constraints that further intensify the level of complexity in the food industry.

To ensure business continuity in challenging times, food companies must respond quickly and effectively through stronger, more resilient supply chains. They can accomplish this when the rules of resilience guide their supply chains. These rules are to:

• Accurately model and simulate the outcomes of planning scenarios
• Quickly and continuously realign forecasting with reality
• Extract the best plans by incorporating and evaluating all constraints
• Proactively reconfigure supply chain plans to meet all critical KPIs
• Leverage collective intelligence from multidisciplinary teams

Then, building on these rules, companies can leverage digital solutions that enable smart supply chain planning. Here’s how it happens.

While managing highly complex and interconnected food supply chains is challenging, using the right business platform makes managing it more effortless. It improves how you make decisions in dynamic environments.

This platform is a single source of truth that offers smart digital tools to make supply chain planning easier and more effective. They include tools that:

• Incorporate all constraints affecting the supply chain
• Provide end-to-end supply chain visibility
• Reveal how the supply chain reacts to different planning scenarios
• Test contingency plans in real time to improve resilience
• Enable agile procurement to maintain healthy inventory levels

More importantly, all supply chain stakeholders can collaborate in this planning process. By leveraging a virtual supply chain twin that digitally mimics what happens in the real world, stakeholders can have the visibility they need to make fast, smart decisions. Planners can test out many scenarios and arrive at the best action plan to solve supply chain planning puzzles. The result? They can optimize processes based on the KPIs that are most important to them.

By being well-informed about potential risks, companies can successfully eliminate the need for guesswork and proactively mitigate supply chain risks. The right business platform promotes agility, a high degree of reconfigurability and better enterprise-wide synchronization for faster growth and higher profits.

Companies that turn to an integrated business platform put themselves in a better position to experience growth, profitability and resilience amid disruptions.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform delivers the collaboration that supply chain stakeholders need. It enables everyone to access the most up-to-date data and gain full visibility across all nodes in the supply chain. This way, they can better coordinate and speed up decision-making processes.

Our platform delivers value by providing smarter, more connected planning for food manufacturers to manage supply chain disruptions and achieve business resilience. When supply chain planning is optimized to make the best decisions, companies can expect efficiency, productivity and profitable results.

Leading food companies from all over the world have experienced this. You can, too.

Be in the best position to handle future disruptions and execute plans with precision when you’re guided by the rules of resilience.