At Daimler Truck North America (DTNA), production and logistics issues often come down to one basic question: Where is the part? The answer to that question, however, is often anything but simple. The company, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, sources hundreds of thousands of parts from suppliers around the world for its trucks, whose brands include Freightliner, Western Star and Detroit Diesel, among others. Ensuring that trucks get to customers on time requires identifying problems early and being able to respond nimbly. But a lack of visibility across the supply chain makes it difficult to know when there are issues that could impact production and consequently, delivery. [caption id="attachment_31550" align="alignright" width="333"] Portrait of Lutz Beck, chief information officer for Daimler Truck North America

Portrait of Lutz Beck, chief information officer for Daimler Truck North America

Lutz Beck.[/caption]

“There are thousands of parts on a truck. Let’s say 10 parts are missing,” says Lutz Beck, chief information officer for Daimler Truck North America. “That means you need to wait until the parts are coming, then you need to rework. We need to know that in advance. This is where we need to have more visibility.”

DTNA is seeking to improve that visibility, reduce downtime and increase efficiencies through adoption of Microsoft’s new Supply Chain Center, which provides a command center experience for users to bring together data from across supply chain systems, like data from Dynamics 365 and other enterprise resource planning system providers, including SAP and Oracle, along with standalone supply chain systems. Part of the Microsoft Supply Chain Platform, the Supply Chain Center also allows customers to use Azure AI insights to predict shortages, automate processes, track supply chain performance goals and better collaborate with internal and external partners. Transform recently spoke with Beck about supply chain challenges and the company’s efforts to redefine how it approaches them. TRANSFORM: From your perspective, how different is today’s global supply chain than it was, say, five or 10 years ago? BECK: It’s more global and it’s more connected and integrated than it was five or 10 years back. You’re much more reliant on global suppliers with global reach, rather than having suppliers around your plants as they were built, as it was in the past. That has changed significantly over the past 10 years. And products themselves are using more technology components. Nowadays, everybody wants connected products in their homes — they want to control their air conditioning or their heating, their washing machine, their dryer. We’re living in a connected world and there’s a lot of demand for those kinds of products. If we do proper forecasting and see what kind of products are coming and what kind of parts they need, we will probably see that the capacity that we have today will by far not be enough to satisfy that demand. TRANSFORM: What have been the major challenges DTNA has faced with its supply chain? BECK: For us, the biggest challenge is visibility of all the different pieces that are in the supply chain. If one of our suppliers is having an issue, if we don’t know that and we still do our scheduling based on what we think is coming on the part side, we will be wrong. And that has an impact on our delivery to our customers. We’re working on a connected and integrated approach so that we know exactly, at any point in time, where is my part? Do I have an issue on the supplier side? Are there any tools that are not working? These are issues we are working on now, to get to a point where we know exactly when the part is arriving at our plant, so that everything we’re doing in terms of scheduling and production is based on the supply chain. The second thing is costs. Usually in the past, you would keep a high inventory on parts to let your production run. That changed over the last year significantly, where you would not keep a lot of inventory. But if you don’t have enough supply of parts, you need to stop production. So that is a danger as well.