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 affects suppliers, consumers, and everyone in between who interacts with the physical world. Nearly every physical object — and the machines that build those products, like robots on an automotive assembly line — are all designed digitally as 3D models before the parts are shipped and the product is manufactured. 

For manufacturers who want to develop more resilient supply chains, start with optimizing for:

The people who design, manufacture, and service parts and products; and

Suppliers who provide parts for products. 

When manufacturers face supply chain challenges, it’s easy and accurate to look at the geopolitical landscape as the root cause of those disruptions. And while that’s true, it’s next to impossible for any single enterprise to control the geopolitical landscape or predict the future with any certainty. 

However, organizations can build a more resilient supply chain by focusing on the people who design and develop products, like engineers, supply chain leaders, maintenance professionals, and factory employees and managers. 

Often underestimated are the downstream impacts on supply chains as a result of how these different people and the tools they use do — or more often, do not — integrate well or permit easy collaboration.

Engineers use tools like AutoCAD, supply chain managers use software like Anvyl or Windchill, and employees on the ground in factories use everything from Oracle to spreadsheets. 

All of these tools break up the way technology collaborates because they view digital, 3D models — the foundation for all physical objects in the real world — differently. 

Manufacturers often have dozens of the exact same part called different things, built for different equipment, made at a different time, with different file names, but a lack of software interoperability means enterprises don’t know it. 

Physna brings the people who design and develop products together

Physna enables collaboration at the technology level based on 3D models by creating a single source of truth that’s accessible across all existing systems of record, significantly reducing design hours, lowering procurement costs, and increasing supply chain resilience.

Physna is the only technology that understands, finds, and classifies 3D models, turning their precise and unique geometry into code. With Physna: 

Engineers reduce design time because they can easily find the models they need and identify functionally equivalent parts to more easily reuse models, rather than needlessly designing duplicate models that complicate inventory management, procurement, and logistics operations. 

Supply chain leaders can identify common components between 3D models — even if those parts are built for different equipment, made at a different time, with different file names — streamlining inventory and consolidating suppliers.

Factory employees and maintenance professionals can seamlessly identify any part of a broken or deficient piece of equipment with just a photo, and share that information with engineering and supply chain counterparts. 

Make smarter procurement decisions. Save on procurement, product support, and life cycle costs and eliminate part redundancy and unnecessary costs. 

Let Physna’s Global Head of Value Engineering, Jay Marshall, 

part II of the supply chain resilience series

, where we’ll discuss supplier optimization