A resilient, agile and sustainable supply chain. These prospects are a good summary of the transformations to be made in industries in France and Europe. This movement, which the semi-conductor shortage will have helped accelerate, will be embodied for ACTIA in 2022. Let us look at how ACTIA relies on its mirror factories and its extended supply chain to develop its ability to produce as close as possible to the customer and optimise production costs.
Extended enterprise and extended supply chain
In his interview, Vincent Turmel, ACTIA purchasing director, presents the idea of an “extended enterprise” when talking about ACTIA’s relationship with its suppliers. This idea of a partnership echoes the extended supply chain concept that governs the group’s supply chain.
Read the article here: ACTIA puts supplier relationships at the centre of its electronics procurement strategy.
Extended supply chain
Logistics is becoming globalised and involves all of the stakeholders in the chain. Following the digitalisation of management tools, procurement, which was internal to the company to begin with, developed into a new concept: the extended supply chain.
This aims to improve flow management: from the raw material to the finished product, involving suppliers and customers.
- The aim of this cooperation in global management of flows of information and goods is to:
- optimise management costs;
- improve product traceability.
It therefore allows the creation of simultaneous flow management and stock consistency between the company’s various internal or external units, in order to optimise these units and provide the service to the end customer in the best economic conditions.
ACTIA’s resilient supply chain
- ACTIA’s logistics know-how extends to all of the cycles:
- procurement,
- transport,
- customs,
- regular and one-off flows,
- Vendor Management Inventory (consignment inventory).
Dedicated teams therefore manage the entire Supply Chain from the various Front office production sites (Sales Administration, Scheduling) to the customers, or to the customers’ own customers. ACTIA has been certified as an Authorised Economic Operator (AEO) since 2011.
The group’s international presence
ACTIA’s international presence allows close contact with global markets. ACTIA negotiates significant purchasing volumes with distributors and manufacturers. This means it can be extremely competitive in the various markets handled.
ACTIA makes use of multisourcing to find alternative supply sources, particularly in the context of its In-Service Support offering and in terms of critical supply chains.
Digital manufacturing
Industrial agility requires information and sharing systems, and management tools, that are able to communicate within a single chain.
The WCM programme
To enhance customer satisfaction and industrial performance, the World Class Manufacturing (WCM) programme coordinates and structures continuous improvement action plans with teams and in the field.
The programme therefore tends to streamline production runs and ensure the flow of information and data.
Within the WCM programme, the digitalisation of production entails:
- reducing human intervention,
- data management,
- training,
- and predicting future events via models.
The ACTIA factory digitalisation program
The ongoing roll-out of NPI
ACTIA is continuing to digitalise its factories by introducing the New Product Introduction (NPI) programme on its industrial sites.
- This important and unifying project is a clear demonstration of ACTIA’s ambition to:
- make proactive DFM (Design For Manufacturing) proposals for its customers,
- become more competitive,
- adapt to fluctuating demand for new products and
- survive the crises that are shaking the EMS market.
ACTIA’s NPI is fully consistent with the factory 5.0 strategy and is a step further towards Digital Manufacturing. It helps to improve competitiveness, product quality and customer service, while consolidating EMS expertise that can be applied on all the group’s industrial sites.
Outline of the programme
The ACTIA factory digitalisation programme will also be based on:
- A Data Lake: which allows all of the data relating to production, product, machine, workforce, etc. to be made available in real time
- Artificial Intelligence: which is complementary, in order to provide analysis and KPIs, and also predictions of the workflows or of issues that production staff can use and, above all, avoid.
- Automation of certain processes, with the introduction of robots, AGVs (Automated Guided Vehicles) and 3D and RX automated optical switches.
Mirror factories
The Design For Manufacturing methods and the production facilities are standardised within the group. They allow complete interoperability between the 3 EMS production sites.
Common standards
Extended operation of ACTIA’s factories is supported by common standards relating to industrial performance with the World Class Manufacturing programme, CSR and Cybersecurity.
A dedicated team
Teams are dedicated to modelling production methods on an international scale, and industry 5.0 technology is consistently adopted on every site.
As a result, synergy is boosted, with pooling of tools and designs as well as decentralisation of industrial management for production units on a local level and as close as possible to the operational teams.
Pooling of test equipment
From the initial design phases, ACTIA’s test strategy has been developed through DFT (Design For Test) analysis.
ACTIA develops production test equipment in-house and is deploying a new generation of testers in support of its manufacturing excellence.
The case of ANGSTROM
The ANGSTROM tester, which stands for ACTIA Next Generation System Tester ROadMap, is a next-generation platform of functional testers. It is based on standard components that are fully modular and scalable. This platform boosts the efficiency and productivity of the group’s production test equipment. The pooling of test equipment developed by ACTIA protects the profitability of its entire production chain.
Key point :
- Extended supply chain;
- Modelling of industrial processes;
- An industrial holistic view;
- Factory interoperability;
- An international industrial presence;
- Manufacturing capacities that are not geographically polarised;
- Supported by factory 5.0 digital resources;
- Supported by a multisourcing procurement strategy.
