Supply Chain Collaboration Strategies

Effective Collaboration and Data Sharing

Barton Phinney: Hello, and welcome to our presentation today on enhancing supply chain relationships through collaborative product development. My name’s Barton Phinney, I’m a principal product manager at aPriori, and I’ve spent the last few years managing our sourcing and collaborative solutions here at aPriori. Today, we’re gonna talk a little bit about collaboration and why it’s important and why so many companies are focused on it, especially around innovation propagation. Next, we’ll talk about aP Workspace and how to use some of the features effectively and collaboration strategies. And then we’re gonna take a deep dive on supply chain management and how you can use aP Workspace to manage supply chain risk and disruptions in real-time.

So let’s talk a little bit about why collaboration is so important and why businesses are so focused on collaboration tools today. Many of you have probably seen this before. This is a representation of an AI neural network. And in a neural network you have three different layers. The first is the inputs layer, and that is the layer that’s responsible for receiving inputs from the outside world, mainly data that will be propagated throughout the network. The next is hidden layers. And these layers are consisted of a bunch of different nodes that do different computational tasks, building on the results from the nodes before it. And then the final layer is an output layer. And the output layer is what generates the final output of the network.

In an AI network, information is propagated linearly. So it goes from the data layer to the hidden layers and then finally to the output layer. Similarly, this is an innovation network, and this is where collaboration really comes into play. In an innovation network, it starts from an input layer of data through a platform that people are connected to. The next layer, instead of being a hidden layer of computational nodes, is a layer of people. And these people are interconnected to each other, similar to how nodes are connected together in an AI network, with various layers and various shells of people working on the outside of different solutions that people are generating. And then the output layer is actually an innovation layer, and this is the final result of ideas propagating throughout the network to meaningful innovations.

Unlike an AI network, the innovation network has propagation throughout the entire network and can actually go forward and backward, right? So as people are talking and collaborating with each other, innovation and ideas are spreading throughout the network in any direction, and ideas can happen at any point in the network itself. But here’s where collaboration really ties into the innovation network and why companies are so focused on it today, is that the effectiveness of an innovation network is the same as an AI network, right? So it depends on the number of nodes in the network, i.e., the number of people that are in that one network, the number of connections, and how well those people are connected to each other. But most importantly, the amount of collaboration in an AI network. All the nodes are collaborating together in a single network. But in an innovation network, people aren’t mandatorily required to collaborate with each other.

And so the more collaboration you have within the network itself, not just the connection, means that the more innovation you can get out of your network. And that’s why collaboration has been such a big focus in the last few years, is that companies have realized they have these big innovation networks internally that are a huge resource for them for innovation, and that the more collaboration and more connections they can build in the network, the more innovations they can get for their business. So we’ve talked a little bit about why collaboration is important and why companies are so focused on it. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the collaboration strategies that are out there because collaboration is such a huge enveloping term today, and many solutions fall under the huge umbrella that is collaboration. But certain tools are good for certain use cases, and that’s what we want to kind of go through a little bit right now, right?

So collaboration can be segmented into synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous, you can think of as like meetings or chats, right? All the participants have to be live and connected to each other at the same time and working together in a live environment, you can only have a single conversation thread at a time, right? If I were to try to talk about multiple things and multiple ideas during our presentation today, no one would be able to follow what I’m trying to say. And so the conversation has to be very limited to a single thread of conversation. Synchronous collaboration is really good for urgent issues that need people to swarm on them and resolve them quickly. Larger group discussions where people kind of just need to freely talk through ideas and build on that in a live environment. And then, most importantly, when decisions need to be recorded elsewhere, right?

You would never want to record decision making or important initiatives in a recording of a meeting, right? You’d want to take some notes or have some other system that manages decisions and outcomes from the meeting. You don’t really want to record decisions in something like chat because they’re notoriously difficult to find those decisions and trace them back through history, right? And that leads us to asynchronous collaboration. So asynchronous collaboration, you can think of as like sharing documents and commenting. Participation can be active or passive, meaning that people can be commenting live and working on the document live together, or they could wait a couple of hours to respond and work sort of when they have time to work on it. You can also have multiple threads of conversation, right? Every time you comment on a document or a piece of a document, you can have multiple streams of threads going at the same time. So it makes it for a more efficient use of people’s time than synchronous collaboration.

Asynchronous collaboration is really good for things like group work. So think about if you have a group of people working on a PowerPoint together and people are reviewing each other’s slides or adding their own slides or making refinements, that’s a really good use case for asynchronous work. Reviewing documents and specifics. So after you’ve completed something and you’re ready to share it out to a larger audience of stakeholders to get feedback on, that’s asynchronous collaboration. And then most importantly, tracking questions and answers to those questions and also decisions has to be an asynchronous task that’s really best suited for tracking those decisions.

BP: So let’s compare two products together, aPriori and Microsoft, and look at some of the collaboration solutions we have today. So Microsoft actually has two different solutions for collaboration. They have a synchronous solution, which is Teams, which I’m sure everyone has heard about, and asynchronous, which is actually Office 365. So think about it like this: when you share a PowerPoint with somebody, that is asynchronous collaboration, and that is handled through Office 365. You might store those documents using some of the file features and Teams, but the actual discussions that take place are through Office 365 itself. But you would never schedule a meeting through something like commenting, right? You would set up a Teams meeting for that, and that’s the synchronous part of the collaboration solution that they offer.

Increasing Collaborative Efforts in aP Workspace

Now in aPriori, we do not have a synchronous solution. We expect our customers to use Teams, slack, etcetera, or other synchronous collaboration tools for those use cases where synchronous collaboration best fits. But for asynchronous collaboration, especially around scenario information, that’s where aP Workspace comes in, and that’s where we would expect customers to use that instead of a synchronous collaboration tool because it’s more efficient to collaborate around the scenario data itself.

Let’s look at some collaboration strategy examples and how we think about aP Workspace fitting into some examples versus Teams fitting into other examples. So the first example is feedback questions on design features. When you’re giving specific feedback on design features themselves, it really helps to be able to capture the design and the specific feature in the context of what you’re collaborating about. It’s very, very difficult to do that in something like a Teams chat. So we would expect that a synchronous solution would not be used for that kind of work and that you would use an asynchronous solution to attach virtual feedback, so aP Workspace. Group design reviews. The primary way of collaborating around group design reviews. We would expect people to use a Teams meeting for that. You’re gonna wanna have people live collaborating, giving discussions so that that conversation and collaboration can flow a little bit more freely end-to-end.

Optimize Your Supply Chain Partnerships

However, we do have some customers that are using aP Workspace as the content of those design reviews. So what they’re doing is they’re collaborating, information sharing, and commenting ahead of time and then they’ll review that as a group together live. That’s totally fine. We would still expect the primary synchronous collaboration tool to be Teams meeting for that. Feedback and questions from a supplier on some of the aspects of an aP estimate from procurement. We would expect aP Workspace to be a good use case for that type of asynchronous feedback, where procurement can come in, attach feedback and discussions and questions from the supplier on specific data points either on the 3D model or on a data field. Explanation of changes to a scenario. It’s gonna be a lot easier for somebody who’s updating the scenario and making changes to leave some comments explaining why they made the changes rather than trying to make the changes, update the file, and then text back to the group in a Teams chat and say, hey, I made these changes, right?

First of all, that’s gonna get lost because the Teams chat is gonna become difficult to find those decisions in after about a month or so. And then second of all, it’s not attached to the actual scenario itself. So you won’t be able to go back and look in history at what decisions were made and why. Questions for a non-aP user, we would expect a teams channel to be used for that simply because aP Workspace right now does not have the capability to collaborate with users who are outside of the aPriori system. That is an enhancement that we’re currently working on. But for today’s current state, we would expect a customer to use a Teams channel for that. For things that don’t require any context or off-the-record questions, people are always gonna need a way to ask questions in private and get clarifications on things. We would expect for a non-tracking collaboration tool, a synchronous collaboration tool like Teams to be used for something like that. And then reviewing past decisions for trends. That’s where we would expect aP Workspace to be used because as people go back and look at different scenarios and what decisions were made and why, all of that information will be captured throughout the comments and discussions that people had on this scenario. So people can go back in time and look at what decisions were made and then use those decisions for future enhancements to their processes.

Let’s talk a little bit about aP Workspace in specific and how it fits into some of the challenges we see in our customers today. So without aP Workspace, even if customers are using aPriori, typically insights either only remain in that system or they become static and distributed through reports basically. Questions are out of context because people can’t link back to the scenario data itself, and then decisions aren’t tracked with the insights. They may be tracked in another system or have some other document that’s tracking those decisions, but they’re separated from the scenario data itself. What this leads to is that your insights are now existing in multiple locations and they’re out of date because they’re not connected to the live scenario. Questions become difficult to answer and feedback loops are… Have a little bit more of a longer lead time because it takes longer to understand what the question is about and going back and looking at the information that’s needed to answer it.

And then decisions are often difficult to find because they’re documented in multiple places. So with aP Workspace, and we’ll dive into these capabilities in a minute, there’s a few different capabilities that Workspace offers in order to help with this, personalized view configuration, being able to anchor discussions to data or a model, being able to filter by need attention on the messages that you have, and then being able to manage multiple scenarios within our projects. Projects is a new feature that we released a few weeks ago, and we’ll go through that in more detail in a minute.

So with aP Workspace, now you have insights that are real time and centralized that people can access and get the latest up-to-date data on. Questions are anchored to the context that they’re about, whether it’s data or a 3D model, and that allows feedback loops to happen in a more timely manner. And then decisions are tracked with the insights as they change. So if insights become updated, you have a decision trail of what changes were made, when and why. So the value that this gives to our customers is that everyone works from the latest data that’s available. Iteration cycle time for questions and feedback is greatly reduced and decisions are easily traceable since you can look back and see what decisions were made and why.

Let’s take a deeper dive on some of the features of aP Workspace. Different personas are interested in different information for their role or their work. So aP Workspace allows users to focus on the information that’s most relevant to their role by allowing them to configure the data that’s in the view itself. We have 100 scenario fields that are available and 50 fields that are available at the process level. To have efficient collaboration context is really needed. So aP Workspace allows users to anchor discussions to pieces of geometry that are in question or relevant as well as data fields. And then the context is captured along with that discussion. So if you attach it to a 3D model, it’ll save the view configuration along with that discussion. Or, if you attach it to a data field, it will scroll and find that data field that it’s attached to and highlight it on the screen. Many messages can accumulate across multiple collaborations and projects, especially as those collaborations grow. And so the messages page allows you to see all of your discussions, but also to filter them for the ones that need your attention the most by being able to filter on discussions that are assigned to you as well as discussions that you’ve been mentioned in.

aP Workspace Projects

And then Projects is a new feature that helps address collaborations that happen around multiple scenarios and where users need to be managed as part of the project. Projects allow groups of scenarios to be collected together and collaborated on as well as to manage the users that are part of that collaboration project. And we’re gonna go through a little bit of a deeper dive on Projects since it’s a new feature that we just released. So this is the projects page in aP W and it shows you all the projects that you’re a part of in your organization as well as if you have any unread notifications on those projects. You can search for projects by project name as well as filter projects by if any, have any unread notifications. You can also create a new project by clicking the new Create New Project button in the top right, you’ll need to give it a name and a description and then you can add components to the project as well. So I’ll just add a few components to this one that are part of my organization.

Then you can invite some team members and add a due date at the end if you want to. And then click Create Project. The project will appear at the top of your list on the projects page. When you open the project, you’ve got a few different tabs available. On the details tab, you can see the status of the project and change it to open in progress or complete. You can also edit any of the details that are part of the project, including the project owner. By default, the project owner is the person who created the project and the project owner is the only person who has edit or delete properties of the project itself or the things in the project. On the parts and assemblies tab, you can see what components are part of the project and the owner can add new components or remove old components at any time.

And then on the users tab, this displays all the users that are part of the project currently. The owner can remove users in the project, but any new user can invite another user to collaborate in the project. Now, note that the project doesn’t control access to scenarios. You can still access any scenario that you would normally have access to by going to the parts and assemblies page, but what the project does do is control who’s allowed to collaborate on those scenarios as well as receiving notifications. Okay, so that concludes the demo of our Projects feature, which was just released a few weeks ago.

So we’ve talked a little bit about why collaboration is important, why businesses are so focused on collaboration tools. We’ve talked about some of the features in aP Workspace and how to go through and use them effectively. Let’s talk about the actual application of aP Workspace in some different examples that our customers have, right? So let’s take a look at new product introduction. We would expect customers to use aP generate, aP design and their CAT system to go through design iteration, optimizing their designs for form fit, function, and cost/manufacturability. Once that process is complete, the design engineer would publish that out to a group of stakeholders to collaborate on through aP Workspace. That group of stakeholders would then provide feedback on the design, which the design engineer could incorporate and then publish back to the group. Perhaps in parallel or after that step, the cost engineer can create a detailed estimation using aP Pro, and then that updated scenario can be published back to the group as well. With the projects feature, you could either keep those scenarios separate so that you can have a chain of scenarios and how they evolve, or you can just update the existing scenario and have the conversations attached to that scenario going forward.

Once those changes are done, they would appear back into the aPriori scenario. Once that’s the case and once that detailed estimation is completed, purchasing can start to work with suppliers and get some of their feedback on additional manufacturability. If there’s any challenges with the design or any cost targets that need to be adjusted, that feedback can then be taken back to the group and collaborated on further. Notice how there’s no endpoint in this cycle. So it’s intended that these are activities are kind of going on throughout the entire development of the product until the product is actually launched.

Let’s take a look at an example for existing products. One of the main use cases with aPriori is opportunity analysis on existing components that are purchased. So we’d expect our customers to use aP generate or even bulk costing to go through and cost a set of scenarios and use aP analytics to find where there’s opportunities. Once that set of opportunities has been identified, it can be put into a project and then collaborated on with different stakeholders who can help realize those opportunities. So perhaps there’s design opportunities and design engineer can work through aP Design to help address some of those design opportunities.

Perhaps there are some regional opportunities that we can take advantage of and cost engineers can use Matrix costing and aP Pro to find out what regions are best suited for some of those opportunities in the set. And then if there are manufacturing opportunities, purchasing can work with suppliers and get feedback on them on how they could adjust their processing to make them more efficient or even find a new supplier to source the component app. Let’s take a deeper dive on supply chain management and how that can be improved using aP Workspace. We typically hear some of the following challenges from our customers and the personas of cost engineering and procurement. So for cost engineering, when they provide an estimate to procurement, sometimes that feedback loop is not very good. And so they’re left wondering, what was the outcome of the negotiation, right? Are there different assumptions that we should have made that were incorrect that we can improve on for next time, right?

Are there alternatives that we should have explored? Should we’ve done different analysis for different regions or different batch sizes or whatnot? And should we start doing that in the future? On the purchasing side, if there’s not a great feedback loop with cost engineering, sometimes procurement isn’t aware of what the assumptions were behind the estimate number that they get, and that makes the conversation with the supplier kind of challenging, right? For one thing, they’re not really sure how they verify the supplier’s feedback. If they don’t have somebody who has a deep technical knowledge of manufacturing to base some of that feedback on, then they won’t be able to really validate whether the supplier is being truthful with them or maybe they’re trying to make it sound more complex so that they can make a few extra bucks, right? And then is their justification accurate? Perhaps there is some justification to what the supplier is saying for a higher price, but maybe it’s not the whole story. And so how do you get that if you’re not talking to somebody who really understands the manufacturing?

Successful Supply Chain Collaboration

Let’s take a look at some of those examples in a little bit more detail on how aP Workspace can be used in the context of different supplier feedback, right? So one piece of typical supplier feedback is there’s a higher cost to the component than was expected to the complexity of the design. So procurement can get the design engineer and cost engineer involved using aP Workspace and have conversations about that. So what the design engineer, maybe there’s modifications we can make to the design to make it less complex for manufacturer. Or, with the cost engineer, maybe the supplier is using a different process than we originally expected for that feature. Maybe there’s a process that’s more efficient than what the supplier has available.

And so that might lead to some questions for the procurement user of do we have another supplier that has the right processes to make that feature on the component? Or, if not, or maybe a different strategy is can we share our process with the supplier that we were expecting so that we get the benefit of sharing that process and having a more efficient process used on our component? And then all the while, because you have this feedback loop with aP Workspace, the cost engineer can continue to improve their digital factory and estimating techniques, so they account for some of these things next time.

Let’s take another example. Price increases due to inflation. So procurement can get the cost engineer involved and ask a few different questions like how have the following items fluctuated in general for the region that the supplier’s in? Material rates, labor rates, consumable overhead, like electricity prices, right? And if those answers kind of jive with what the supplier is saying, maybe there’s different regions that aren’t as affected by inflation as the region that the supplier’s in. So maybe we want us to do a regional analysis to look at different opportunities in different regions where inflation hasn’t been as high. And that can give procurement the confidence to pushback and with specific information and data against price increases or confident that they have to conceive because they wanna stick with that supplier and inflation has indeed increased those costs to about what the supplier is saying.

And again, the cost engineer can use the information from the outcome of that negotiation to improve their estimating for next time. Okay, so then next example would be there’s manufacturing differences at the supplier than what was expected in the estimate. So again, procurement can get the cost engineer involved using aP Workspace and have a conversation about some items like do the supplier’s assumptions make sense? Maybe they’re using the same processes but they’re running different feeds or speeds or different material margins or whatnot than what we’re expecting, right? Is there something suboptimal about their processing? Maybe they’re using different processes or maybe even just the steps within the process are different than what we were expecting.

And then perhaps the supplier is on par with other suppliers in that regions in terms of how they’re making the component. So should we look at different regions where they’re using more efficient processing to make the component? And then based on the feedback from the cost engineer, the procurement person can have a conversation with the supplier on whether they’re willing to make any of those changes that might help reduce the cost of what they’re quoting due to manufacturing efficiency. And again, the cost engineer can incorporate that feedback for improving their estimates. So the last example I want to go through today is with sustainability. In particular, if you’re working with a supplier who’s giving you a pretty good price for the component, but they’re actually providing a much higher cost of sustainability than what is gonna be appropriate for your organization to take on, right?

So procurement can get a sustainability engineer and/or cost engineer involved and start having conversations around with them, right? So for the sustainability engineer, let’s talk about the supplier a little bit. Are they less sustainable than others in their region? Are they on par? Maybe they’re even more sustainable. And that’s just an expectation that we had going into this. Are there process opportunities? So maybe the process itself is the issue or maybe the material is the issue and there’s material opportunities there, right? Changing those different things could help alleviate some of that higher cost sustainability. And then working with the cost engineer, can we do a regional matrix and see what opportunities we have? Perhaps the supplier is on par with other suppliers in that region, but perhaps other regions can provide the component at a similar price, but have a much better cost in its sustainability. And so the cost engineer can do a regional analysis to see what other opportunities might be in different regions.

And again, especially because sustainability is kind of a new area for a lot of folks in terms of incorporating that into their procurement strategies, continuous improvement in this area is really beneficial for the cost engineer because as they get more field data on sustainability, they can incorporate that into their estimations. So today we talked about why collaboration is so important, why businesses are so focused on it. We talked about the features of aP Workspace and how to leverage them effectively and we went through some practical applications of aP Workspace and how to use it. So if you wanna get started with aP Workspace, aP Workspace is gonna be enabled for all 23.1 customers. So when you’re upgraded to that, you should be getting it as part of your upgrade process.

As part of aP Workspace, we have a bunch of in-app help guidance to help new users get started with it. And we also have courses on aP Academy that you can use to help get some background on how to use the application. And then if you’re looking for more targeted feedback on how to leverage aP Workspace for your specific use cases, our account teams are trained on how to leverage the best practices. So definitely get in touch with them and they can help guide you for a specific use case that you’re looking to use it for. That does it for our presentation today. From all of us at aPriori, thank you for attending today.