Supply chain, sustainability and workforce challenges present uncertainty and opportunity.
by Dale Tutt
For Industry Week
Industry faces a year of uncertainty and potential in 2023 that can be encapsulated in three major trends: supply chain disruption, sustainability and workforce turnover. Each of these challenges is connected, and each offers an opportunity for innovation and transformation, especially considering advancements in digital technologies. Digitalization offers a foundation for companies to embrace exciting technologies: additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) and the industrial metaverse.
Each of these technologies has benefits and capabilities that can help companies solve the challenges that supply chain disruption, sustainability and a changing workforce bring in 2023.
1. Disruptions cause supply chain uncertainty
Despite the growing complexity and breadth of supply chains around the world, many companies continue to rely on relatively simple means of tracking and managing their supply chain processes. The difficulties of recent years have illustrated the limitations of this approach. Instead. The digital twin can be used to model supply chains and business processes, helping companies better understand the complexities of their value chains, identify problems and prescribe solutions. With the significant amounts of data available from across a company’s supply chain, digitalization is necessary to gain such a perspective.
One of the key deficiencies of today’s most common solutions for supply chain management is an inability to provide context or situational awareness across an entire supply chain. A comprehensive supply chain digital twin hosted in the industrial metaverse, which leverages existing technologies including AR/VR, can be used to create intuitive visualizations that are easier to digest than numbers in a table or points on a chart. The industrial metaverse enables companies to harness the power of large-scale computing and in-depth visualizations to analyze and interrogate the digital twin, providing a higher level of situational awareness on a global scale—again, dependent on the availability of huge amounts of data.
