“The success of retail, manufacturing and wholesale industries relies heavily on an efficient supply chain ecosystem where companies’ ability to trace and visualize the bilateral flow of goods, information and cash throughout the value chain at a given moment has become ever more critical. Asian companies have extensively applied IoT and big data to capture real-time business intelligence from all the touchpoints, and overcome business blind spots in the ecosystem. Though combining IoT and big data is far from new, it is the recent extensive application of these disruptive technologies that is proving to be a game changer for the supply chain,” said Raymond Ng, Vice President, Vertical Solutions, NTT Com Asia.
While some of these companies seemed more reluctant to adopt 3D printing, we know that the technology is expanding around the world, and has played an increasingly important role in the rise of Industry 4.0, which describes an ongoing trend of automation and data exchange with emerging technologies like additive manufacturing, robotics, and virtual/augmented reality. Talk about a game changer – just look at the Squink! This multilayer PCB printer, which prints conductive traces on circuit boards and other materials like Kapton and ceramics, just finished a $1M seed round of financing a few months ago.
“Strategically selecting a mix of disruptive technologies to overhaul the supply chain is only the first step of a successful digital transformation journey,” Ng said. “It all comes down to three important determining factors – the readiness of infrastructure, connected technology and people to make sense of data to derive actionable business intelligence.”
So, in order to speed up the business transformation once they adopt their chosen technologies, over 60% of respondents say they’ll outsource transformation projects in order to reduce cost and deployment time, and get cross domain expertise from their suppliers. Even this could present its own unique challenges: the suppliers are expected to have a good understanding of the needs of different sectors, the flexibility to handle ever-changing business environments, and the technological know-how and capabilities to supply cross-platform support.
You can download the survey Whitepaper here, or watch the video to get more information:
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