At the center of many people’s everyday experience lay packaged goods—whether it’s the coffee that helps perk you up in the morning or the iPad that lulls you to sleep at night. Our lives are surrounded by CPG experiences.
While it’s pretty profound to think that CPGs touch such a large part of our lives, it’s even more staggering to realize exactly what goes into the manufacturing of these everyday items.
“CPG has one of the highest business complexities of any industry," explained Dassault VP Philippe Loeb, “and this is in the context of a volatile marketplace where 80 percent of products fail within the first year.”
According to Dassault, the Perfect Production suite will try to bend this astonishingly high product failure curve by establishing greater transparency across a product’s production operations. This will help companies establish best practices that can be replicated across product lines.
To accomplish this, Dassault contends that the Perfect Production suite can help producers reduce inventory and increase production throughput by matching product volume with manufacturing capacity. Additionally, Perfect Production is touted as being able to slash product introduction rates by making it easy to handle digital documentation.
Finally, the Perfect Production suite also provides management visibility to operations, works in progress, inventories and many other parameters. By packaging all of this information into a single dashboard, an all-encompassing production picture can be assessed quickly.
As a knock on effect, Dassault says this type of expansive, consolidated control can help codify best practices in complex industries, making product success a much easier milestone to achieve. It might even make it routine.
So, in the end, what exactly is the Perfect Production suite? I think that it extends the digital twin model to the CPG manufacturing landscape.
But one thing that doesn't make a ton of sense to me is where the market is for this type of product. Medium to large consumer product–oriented corporations would already have an in-house production suite tracking the very dynamics that make this Dassault product valuable. If they’d didn't, would they be sizeable or successful?
Furthermore, why isn't someone like Wal-Mart (and their all-seeing ability to formulate, track, stock and sell products) offering a time tested CPG product that can deliver the same type of insight as Dassault’s new suite?
Whatever the case may be, Dassault seems to be expanding the capabilities of its 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Maybe one day Dassault will have the ability to offer a package the likes of which I imagine Wal-Mart already possesses.
One thing is for certain, consumer products will be around for some time. Having a tool to manage the complexity of their production would be a coup for anyone with that kind of software in their possession— whether it's from Dassault Systèmes or created internally.