The story in brief
The Digital Supply Chain marks a fundamental turning point in the evolution of the traditional supply chain, responding to the growing needs for agility, adaptability and robustness imposed by the current market. This revolution is fueled by the incorporation of advanced digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence, IoT, data analytics and blockchain. These technologies not only optimize production processes, but also strengthen control over them, bringing tangible innovations. In practice, the Digital Supply Chain transforms and digitizes the entire supply chain, favoring an integrated system that crosses various sectors. These, which once operated in silos such as sales, product development and marketing, now converge on a single objective: leaner management based on complete traceability.
Context
Our organization has been operating for several years in software solutions and products that make use of the most modern technologies in the IoT, Cloud Computing and more recently also using Blockchains. Furthermore, as a technological partner, we have been involved in several funded R&D projects aimed at developing IT solutions for different production chains (CiTrace project and Simove project). This context has favored investment in internal R&D projects aimed at the study and development of prototypes linked to the innovative scenario of the Digital Supply Chain.
Goal of the project
The goal of this project stems from a research and development path already undertaken by Innonation in the supply chain sector. Concretely, the investment concerned an industrial research phase aimed at analyzing the main enabling technological solutions for the digital supply chain: IoT solutions, Additive manufacturing, Big Data and Analytics, Blockchain. Furthermore, a further objective was to analyze and design a Supply Chain Management (SCM) model based on digital technologies with respect to different use cases with the aim of creating value for consumers.
Results and Future Developments
The results of this project concern various aspects which can be summarized below:
State of the art on technologies enabling digital supply chains
In-depth analysis and design of an SCM model
Study and implementation of use cases compared to known scenarios
Acquisition of specialist skills by the R&D team on the use of enabling technologies
Based on these results, we are proceeding with the development of POC and experimental prototypes to be adapted to the scenarios analyzed and studied through this industrial research project.