Improving Supply Chain Resilience with Network Centric Manufacturing

The recent economic crisis has made it impossible to ignore the high costs of disruptions on manufacturing supply chains: they threaten the productivity, profitability, and reputation of every organization in the enterprise. In one recent study, 58% of manufacturing sector respondents had experienced increased disruption and 73% were concerned about disruptions in the coming year.

In recent decades, the industry has adopted strategies for improving quality, productivity, and cost control, but we’ve overlooked the need to improve supply chain resilience—the ability to adapt and thrive in the face of disruption. The emerging Network Centric Manufacturing (NCM) model offers a solution.

In the NCM manufacturing enterprise, hierarchical, static supply chains are replaced with flexible yet highly coordinated dynamic supplier networks that can maintain performance amidst internal or external change. NCM addresses a critical paradox of static manufacturing supply chains—the rigidity that is intended to mitigate risk and support cost control can actually introduce greater risk by limiting the flexibility required to control costs in continually changing environments.

Manufacturing has changed, and now manufacturing supply chain management practices must catch up. This paper will describe the basic concepts of the NCM model and how it can be used to improve resilience across the entire manufacturing enterprise.