DRIVE | Plexus

Predicting the future to mitigate supply chain risk.

Your business depends on keeping your promises. Getting new products to market on time and delivering existing products with no issues. And the more complex your product, the greater the risk across your supply chain. That’s why Plexus created DRIVE, an industry-leading predictive analytics solution to find and mitigate risks — and give you the peace of mind of a consistent, uninterrupted supply chain.

Solution Spotlight

CUSTOMER:

Major OEMs with Global Supply Chain

PRODUCT:

DRIVE: Differentiated Risk Insight and Valued Execution

SOLUTIONS:

SUPPLY CHAIN SOLUTIONS

If there’s one thing that keeps you up at night, there’s a good chance it’s supply chain risk.

Delivering a product to market is a journey full of complexities and risks. Around every corner, there is the chance for some factor to slow you down, send you searching for alternatives, or stop you altogether. And when your customers are depending on the products you create, these aren’t just little bumps in the road. Disruptions in your supply chain can be the difference between a profitable year and missing an opportunity entirely.

In your world, late delivery is the worst-case scenario, sending out a ripple effect that can not only cost you in lost revenues, but harm your customer relationships and damage your reputation. But what if you could get ahead of it? If you could see the risks before they appear and avoid the delays before they happen? That’s exactly why we’ve developed DRIVE — Differentiated Risk Insight and Valued Execution — a predictive, proactive ecosystem for risk mitigation. It’s an end-to-end supply chain solution designed to reduce the risks and uncertainties you worry about, before they materialize as costly delays.

Uncovering, assessing and addressing risk through the entire product lifecycle.

Plexus created DRIVE to give you one thing: confidence. For the OEM racing to get a product to market — where supply chain issues can cause delays, allowing the competition to leapfrog your launch and beat you to the marketplace. For an existing product when demand is ramping up and you need your supply chain to meet the challenge, or the startup that needs to prove to shareholders that they’ll be able to deliver what they’re promising. DRIVE means confidence for any company looking to keep or grow market share, innovate and iterate, where spending time putting out supply chain fires takes focus away from building your business.

We can deliver that confidence because we’ve thought through the entire process. DRIVE brings together a spectrum of tools all working in harmony to give you visibility into your supply chain and the required insight to strategically address any issues. So you can be informed, empowered and ready to mitigate risk at every turn.

With DRIVE, our customers have a greater certainty, because we’re identifying and mitigating supply chain risks before they translate into meaningful financial impact.

Step 1: Predictive Analytics

It starts with gathering data, using Plexus’s proprietary system for predictive analytics, ALARM (Assembly Level Analytics of Risk Management). Powered by a proprietary Plexus algorithm, ALARM analyzes and quantifies multiple factors of risk for every component within your supply chain, from market conditions to sourcing strategies, lifecycle management and supplier performance. ALARM identifies and prioritizes high risk parts, which enables us to develop strategic mitigation plans to address these high areas of risk.

Step 2: Risk Assessment

The next tool in our analytics driven platform is SCAN (Supply Chain Assessment Navigator). With SCAN, we take the predictive analytics from ALARM to generate a comprehensive findings review. The report provides key insights at the component and product level, and supplies the foundation for our risk mitigation strategy. With SCAN, you have a starting point for identifying immediate risks and the information to take immediate action.

Step 3: Risk Mitigation Strategy

The real value in all the data comes in creating a strategy that allows you to execute and implement an effective plan. That’s where our Strategic Mitigation Action Response Tracker, or SMART, comes in. Predictive intelligence alone can be challenging to act on — SMART makes it possible. This is where the Plexus team prioritizes high-risk components, builds a strategy to address them, and employs a suite of risk mitigation tools to execute on the plan.

Step 4: Scoring the Results

When all is said and done, a process is only as good as its results. That’s why we close the loop with SCORS (Supply Chain Optimization Results Summary). SCORS shows us exactly how the strategy we’ve employed has reduced risk across the supply chain. It’s how you track the impact of the risk mitigation strategy and lay the groundwork for continuous improvement across the product lifecycle.

SMART: With SMART, we simplify all the complex predictive data into a clear, actionable strategy for mitigating risk.

Bringing it Full Circle

As a complete ecosystem for proactive supply chain risk mitigation, DRIVE allows us to anticipate issues and address them from day one. It brings new insight to the Design for Supply Chain process, allowing true integration between supply chain, engineering and manufacturing from the very beginning through the entire product lifecycle.

Driving real change for your supply chain — and real results for your brand.

Plexus customers — from major aerospace and defense contractors, to healthcare, life sciences, and industrial OEMs — are seeing the difference DRIVE can make. One recent customer engaged Plexus to assess a bill of materials consisting of 667 components. With DRIVE’s predictive analytic algorithms, we were able to identify 67 higher-risk parts. Our team outlined the risks for the customer, then jointly created the strategy to mitigate them and reduce the risk of the overall supply chain.

And the most important result is certainty. The confidence of knowing you’ll have the continuity of supply you rely on, whether you’re launching a new product or delivering an existing one. When you can rely on a supply chain partner like Plexus, with proactive tools like DRIVE, that’s where you’ll find real peace of mind. You’ll know you’re far less likely to get that phone call that forces you to drop everything to chase down parts you thought you could count on. Instead of spending your time — and revenues — on reactionary supply chain challenges, you’ll be able to focus on the strategies that build a better business. And you can be confident that your product will get where it needs to be, with the support of a supply chain partner who is dedicated to protecting and growing your brand.

“We are very impressed with the supply chain risk mitigation system Plexus has employed. We are fully operational and thankful for the detailed reports that are generated for us.” — Major Aerospace OEM

DRIVE: Predictive, Proactive Supply Chain Risk Management