If we detail a little what we have observed at OPEO, and it is an observation established thanks to all of our customers who call on us or whom we help, there are four really strategic facets that revolve around the product, the footprint, and then, generally, the value chain, and finally the circular industry.

The product

On the product, it is something that is long-termist; we nevertheless have a fairly massive trend, notably in consumer goods, to ask the question of simplifying the hardware part of the product and instead putting the complexity on the software in order to be able to simplify flows and diversity and to have industrial systems that are easier to manage in terms of planning.

Because the more SKUs you have, the more complexity you have, and obviously the more complicated industrial production planning then becomes.

For example, in the automotive sector, we can compare what Tesla does with what the more classic manufacturers do. What the classic manufacturers suffer from a lot is that they often launch a new car and plan fifteen, twenty different versions of the same car, but only one or two of them work, whereas in their industrial system they have all the possible options, so they have all the stock and consequently, in terms of planning, it is extremely complex to manage. 

Compared to Tesla, which will instead go all out to say that its car is simple, a bit like an iPhone—it is available in two or three colors, it has two or three seat options, two or three wheel options, there are few car options—and instead they put the value on the software. 

The agile footprint

The second important subject, which is more and more important, is the agile footprint. With what is currently happening, we are witnessing a big return of protectionism, from both the Chinese and the Americans... We come from a world that was opening up a lot and we are returning to a world that is closing back up. And so that means that each time I reinvest in a new plant, that I increase the capacity of my sites, I have to ask myself the question "what is the place where I should invest in relation to the potential customs and regulatory barriers that I am going to have?".

And so it is extremely important to have a very frequent "refresh," at least every six months, on several questions: "what is my footprint?" "Should I rather make the next investments in Europe, in Asia, rather in the United States?" And "how do I best allocate these investment envelopes to be as agile as possible in relation to the market I have and the growth potential I have on the commercial side?".

Traceability

The third subject is traceability. This subject is indirectly connected to that of planning, but it is nevertheless important to realize that the end customer is increasingly demanding about what they buy.

There are standards that are increasingly demanding in Europe; we have the AGEC law arriving on consumer goods, and so as time goes on, you have to be able to be very good on end-to-end data, so I require my suppliers to also have very strong tracking. And this has several virtues, that of traceability to give information to the end customer on the safety and origin of the products, but also that of planning, because if I create this data chain at the plant interface, I am also going to be much more capable of doing track-and-trace, and therefore of being transparent about the different steps of my flow.

A sector that has been confronted with this for years is aerospace, since we are on a complex chain, with tier-one, tier-two, tier-three, sometimes tier-four players, and so they have been working together for quite a long time to create this transparency. Planning efforts do not necessarily stop at the company or the plant, but they are also necessarily often at the interface with the rest of the supply chain.

The circular industry

Finally, the last subject is the circular industry. We have more and more thinking to design flows, not only linear ones, but also return flows, on consumer goods notably. For example, in automotive, we have people thinking about recovering parts that are in the system, that are on the cars, that are at the end of life, in order to be able to remanufacture them and therefore resell them as new.

So if you want to do this correctly, it means that you will not only need to be able to plan new products, but also to plan, at the same time, those you are going to remanufacture, thanks to a routing system at the start, because you do not know exactly what will need to be done on the part.

And so, you have to think about these flows in order to be able to manage both in parallel. And then, you will need to be agile enough to be able to insert these remanufacturing flows into the existing flow. We are at the very beginning of the movement; it is a fundamental movement because, in any case, decarbonization is a subject, but the real subject for the planet, in fact, is the use of materials. Materials not being infinite, we have to limit the use of materials, so we have to recycle and remanufacture much more.