Implementation of a Digital Product Footprint and Supply Chain Transparency Platform

The client manages products composed of numerous components sourced from diverse suppliers. They face difficulty in consolidating all component documentation, supplier details, and replacement histories within a unified, accessible platform. Existing processes lack end-to-end traceability and real-time visibility across multiple organizations involved in the product lifecycle, hindering efficient bidding, configuration, and change management activities.

A large manufacturing enterprise with complex supplier networks seeking enhanced visibility and traceability of product components across their entire lifecycle and supply chain.

• Develop a scalable platform that consolidates all component documentation, supplier information, and maintenance history.
• Enable multi-organizational visibility of product dependencies and component interrelations across the supply chain.
• Support critical business processes such as bidding, product configuration, and change management through integrated data access.
• Implement a secure, role-based access system with separate interfaces for different subprocesses to ensure data privacy and concern separation.
• Prototype a functional system demonstrating improved product lifecycle traceability and supply chain collaboration, aiming for industry recognition and early stakeholder feedback.

• Multiple user interfaces tailored for distinct business processes/subprocesses, supporting concern separation and security.
• Cross-organizational data access enabling users to reach across proprietary data structures of different partner organizations.
• Graph-based visualization of product assemblies, components, and dependencies with detailed metadata such as manufacturer, manufacturing date, maintenance, and repair history.
• Integration with external enterprise systems such as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems and IoT frameworks.
• Data anonymization capabilities to allow sharing of complex product representations while safeguarding sensitive information.
• Support for cloud deployment architecture, leveraging containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and industrial IoT interoperability frameworks.

• Enterprise Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems to synchronize product data
• Industrial IoT frameworks for data collection and real-time monitoring
• Supply chain information systems for procurement and logistics data
• Security and identity management systems for role-based access control

• System scalability to support increasing numbers of products and components with minimal performance degradation
• High availability and reliability to ensure continuous access for multi-site stakeholders
• Data security and compliance with industry standards, including role-based access and anonymization features
• Performance: system response times to support real-time decision-making, with targets of under 2 seconds for key queries
• Modularity and flexibility to adapt to various industry-specific workflows

The implementation of this platform is expected to significantly enhance product traceability, enabling faster and more accurate bidding, configuration, and change management processes. It will improve supply chain transparency, reduce time-to-resolution for component issues, and foster stronger multi-stakeholder collaboration. Anticipated benefits include improved data consistency, better compliance with industry standards, and a reduction in operational risks associated with incomplete or inaccurate product information.