AdvancedManufacturing.org
Now, Ribet is leading Dassault Systèmes’ charge to
gather more high-tech customers, as well as distribution partners and system integrators, in China. That includes technology suppliers—contract manufacturing services companies, specialized electronics providers, battery and power suppliers and builders of components and semi- conductors—and OEMs specializing in consumer elec- tronics, computing and communication equipment and “everything related to residential automation, security, robotics, and industrial automation.” High-tech companies have done “a lot of work in the
last 15-20 years to optimize and streamline the manu- facturing supply chain, and they are still going through a massive, massive transformation right now because the market in which they operate is transforming very, very fast,” he said. That’s because high-tech companies no longer have
just a few customers for which they turn out a pretty stan- dardized product in one or two countries. Au contraire. “Now, when you look at companies like Pegatron,
Wistron, Foxconn, Flex, they don’t have the relatively limited number of large customers that they had 15 years ago; they have way more than traditional PC and server OEMs used to have,” Ribet said. “They also have much smaller customers that have absolutely nothing to do with the conditions and demands that they were used to.
The minimum order quantities are smaller but the com- plexity of products, their miniaturization, their degree of sophistication in electronics and software is higher. “So instead of manufacturing PCs and servers and TVs and phones and screens and so forth, they need to start to manufacture and engineer and manage the supply chain of wearable devices, smart cameras, smoke detec- tors, embedded systems for automotive and complex medical devices,” he said. “This is great for them because this it extends the opportunity to create new high-tech products. But it is really, really challenging because in- stead of having dozens of customers, they have hundreds customers, with a super-high degree of complexity, vari- ants, confi gurations, suppliers, components” And instead of orders for 200,000-400,000 units, the
companies make 15,000-25,000 units. “The game be- comes to address the orders as quickly as possible and refuel as quickly as possible,” he said. With that comes “a totally diff erent way of working”—
with new levels of complexity and possible variants. Manufacturers have settled on four key issues: global
production challenges, manufacturing visibility, quality and material fl ow. “When you manufacture a watch, you cannot make
it available in Germany in three months and then in Spain after that and in the US after that,” Ribet said. “Things worked like that years ago. But consumers are
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