Curiosity, creativity and collaboration – creating a digitally integrated supply chain
Christopher JordanLevel 3, 5 Mill Street. Perth, WA 6000, Australia. Email: christopher.jordan@accenture.com
The APPEA Journal 57(2) 477-480 https://doi.org/10.1071/AJ16148
Accepted: 3 March 2017 Published: 29 May 2017
Abstract
With the need to extend the life of ageing assets, manage shorter maintenance campaigns and ensure availability of resources, companies are becoming more curious and creative about possible solutions and more willing to collaborate across traditional silos. Oil and gas companies are building more digitally integrated supply chains and are seeing significant results.
When a damaged gasket can cost US$1M/day and create a major safety hazard, even early stage implementation of digital technologies can generate significant improvements. A liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant was curious about what they could achieve through better data integration and alignment. Visualising activity plans and digitally integrating equipment strategies through bill of materials improved the plant’s supply responsiveness, increasing both asset availability and production output by 2%.
Creatively leveraging automation across the supply chain is helping companies become more connected. Starting with advanced analytics, the building blocks for end-to-end solutions are being built. In the near future, predictive part failures data will automatically load into work management processes, maintenance plans will immediately update and the right parts automatically ordered at the right time. Some companies are experimenting with this ‘virtual handshake’ across departments and systems, creating a smarter, faster and more reliable operation. Using both analytics and improved collaboration, one LNG operation has seen a 40% reduction in duplicate parts, a 30% reduction in inventory and an 8% reduction in overall maintenance cost.
Through curiosity, creativity and collaboration across a digitally integrated supply chain, industry organisations can reduce controllable operational cost, making them more reliable and competitive.
Keywords: analytics, automation, connectivity, collaboration, digital, integration, maintenance, operations, procurement, supply, value chain, virtual handshake.
Christopher Jordan is a Principle Director for Accenture’s Resources team and part of Supply Chain & Operations in Perth, WA. He is a chemical process engineer, specialising in process and operational improvement, reliability, supply chain management and business transformation. Chris has over 20 years’ experience working with front line operations to executive management. He holds a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Alberta (Canada) and an MBA from the University of Western Australia and is a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt. Chris is a registered engineer in both APEGA, Canada and Engineers Australia. |
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