Digital Twin, IMage credit Pixabay\TumisuParkourSC has announced the release of a digital twin capability for supply chain operations. The new features will enable organisations to achieve greater resilience, agility, and transparency. All three are critical as supply chains continue to be volatile.

With a digital twin of their supply chain, operation organisations can define the different attributes of every entity within their supply chain. This includes companies, suppliers, warehouses, logistics, distribution centres, customers, software systems, locations, sensors, and products. It enables them to quickly understand the impact of a single failure or change within these elements.

The platform enables supply chain managers to create low code recipes to map business rules, KPIs and specific thresholds applicable to their business or supply chain. For example, what would be the impact of doubling the size of a specific warehouse? Would this increase the efficiency of the supply chain or reduce it?

The platform enables the organisation to better plan for exigent circumstances and longer-term changes. In recent years, Covid, Suez blockage, and the Ukraine war have enforced unforeseen changes to global supply chains. Supply chain managers can model both future plans and these unforeseen incidents more accurately than ever before.

With the digital twin in place, any small change within the supply chain can be modelled quickly to gauge the impact and help decide upon the restorative actions. Furthermore, once modelled, plan for growth and ensure that the supply chain can cope with any scaling of operations.

Mahesh Veerina, ParkourSC CEO, commented: “Current market volatilities ratchet up the pressure on lean supply chains to remove barriers and improve resiliency. Our real-time supply chain operations platform enables companies to digitize their supply chains, embed intelligence, automate workflows, and optimize operations to increase revenue, reduce operating costs and improve profits.

“With ParkourSC, organizations can move beyond visibility in their supply chains to drive innovation, competitive advantage, and growth through new products and services.”

Why this matters

In recent years supply chains have faced increasing disruption. Knut Alicke revealed the impact of recent events in an interview with All things Supply Chain saying: “COVID-19 has catapulted supply-chain resilience to the top of the corporate agenda, but we could already see when we began this research that supply-chain shocks were becoming more frequent and severe because of changes in both the environment and the economy.

“Most important, we found that, on average, companies can expect to lose 40 percent of one year’s EBITDA each decade due to supply-chain shocks—and in some industries, a single severe shock causing a 100-day disruption could wipe out an entire year’s earnings.”

For those companies about to create a resilient supply chain, there is a huge upside, as Alicke continued: “A company with a resilient supply chain can reduce the EBITDA impact of a disruption by 23 percentage points, and an average large company could invest up to 40 percent of one year’s EBITDA in resilience measures and still have a positive return on investment when viewed over a decade.

The ParkourSC platform and its new digital twin capabilities offer a solution that can help to deliver that resiliency. Customers already using the ParkourSC platform have seen the benefits. Tom Weir, chief operating officer for CSafe Global, commented: “Our mission is to continuously improve the reliability and security of the pharma cold chain to ensure life-saving and life-enhancing therapies reach the patients who need them.

 “The rapid growth of complex biologics and advanced therapies is driving the need for ever-more sophisticated cold-chain shipping solutions. We partner with ParkourSC to deliver real-time shipment monitoring and visibility across our global service network to enable our customers to confidently manage complex shipping lanes and potentially intervene if delays, damage, or excursions are discovered during transit.

“Access to this advanced, reliable, real-time monitoring solution has been a key driver for why customers trust CSafe for their most critical cold-chain shipping needs. Partnering with ParkourSC has been foundational to building this competitive advantage.”

How do customers take advantage?

While this announcement reveals the launch of the digital twins. There are few details on how this fits with the rest of the ParkourSC platform. Enterprise Times posed some questions to ParkourSC that  Alok Bhanot, CTO of ParkourSC, responded to.

Is the Digital Twin capability separate from the three solution Assets, Inventory and Logistics that ParkourSC provides?

No, the solutions are integrated and enabled by the digital twin.”

Do customers need to have one or more of these solutions to take advantage?

“No, they can build or extend a digital twin first.”

Who creates the low-code rules? Does ParkourSC provide any accelerators to speed time to value? If so, for what industries and Geographies?

“The low code rules can be created by people in a particular company (such as a manufacturer, 3PL, etc.) or by global systems integrators. ParkourSC does provide accelerators for functional use cases and exception and excursion management.“

Bhanot also revealed that Digital Twins is included in all pricing levels for the ParkourSC platform. It enables a customer to take advantage of the new feature regardless of the price they pay. However, it seems likely that the full capabilities of Digital Twins only become available at the higher end of the pricing matrix.

ParkourSC Workbench View
ParkourSC Workbench View

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

While this announcement reveals the launch of the digital twins, the details of features and functionality behind the new functionality are scarce. There is also little on the website to extend this knowledge as of writing. Hopefully, this will change soon.

The ParkourSC platform already delivers capabilities to deliver predictably across inventory, assets and logistics. The first case studies to emerge will be really interesting to see. They should indicate how organisations are leveraging the digital twins. Also, how they are delivering scenario planning capabilities to really make a difference to the supply chain planning of those first adopters.

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