Helping manufacturing customers minimise COVID-19 disruption

Amidst the panic of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s easy to forget that this crisis, despite its severity, is only one of the challenges with which enterprises and their employees must cope. Thus, Ringier Trade Media Ltd organised a webinar, titled “Helping Manufacturing Customers Minimise COVID-19 Disruption, to offer audience a fast, simple and cost-effective solution to help fight consequences of the coronavirus, and other crises brought by this pandemic.

Over 100 registered for the webinar, with live interview from Indonesia and speaker presentations from Vietnam and Singapore. The webinar was an important touch point for both manufacturers and distributors to understand the impact of COVID-19 and the methods being discussed for dealing with the increased costs to the supply chain.

Meanwhile, a technical presentation from our business partner colour management solutions provider Datacolor, showed how to improve the precision, performance and efficiency of your colour workflow later from Datacolor.

Steven Le, Sales Manager of Datacolor Vietnam, said, “As a competent, experienced partner, Datacolor guarantees a smooth initiation. We offer not only products, but a comprehensive concept, and support at the integration of suppliers into the process.”

Business goes on

Although countries in South East Asia are now restricting movement, it is clear that many companies in the region are taking steps to reduce the pain of forced shutdowns. To continue operating as normally as possible companies are turning to digitalisation. During the live interview with Mr. Paulus Bambang WS, Director, PT Astra International, he mentioned that that every company has to go digital.

According to him, there are three things to keep in mind when doing digitalisation in sales and marketing. 1) Enhance productivity by automating manual tasks in order to reduce human errors and optimise supply chain, 2) Improve profitability thru accelerating decision making and unlocking new propositions, reducing marketing spend, spend, capitalise on insights, enable speed-to-market. 3) Uplift customer experience via segmentation-based marketing, product & service personalisation, drive impactful engagement.

He added, “Digitalisation is critical to every organisation. If you don’t have the digital life your business will fade away.”

Opportunity to make things better

According to Mr. Toshiharu Sato, General Director of Sumida Electronic Vietnam Co. Ltd, COVID-19 is an opportunity to make things better.

“What we are seeing is the effect of a decade and more of globalisation, where longer and more complex supply chains have spread across the world, lured by the pull of cheap labour and low-cost production, chiefly in China and the South East Asia,” he said.

Mr. Sato explained that when supply chains are based chiefly on price, lower cost economies will always win out, and yet as the Coronavirus crisis has shown, in all too many cases, when push comes to shove, being dependent on others doesn’t guarantee supply.

He remarked that in the post-Coronavirus world, companies/countries, will have to think again about the cost-benefit analysis of their supply chains. Recently, Japan has earmarked 220 billion yen (US$2 billion) for companies to shift production back to Japan and 23.5 billion yen for those seeking to move production to other countries, all aimed at reducing Japan’s reliance on the Chinese manufacturing supply base.

“Industry will need to identify any risk of failure in the supply chain, whereby the closing border, or a natural disaster/epidemic could impact on the higher tiers of the supply chain,” he revealed.

Procurement

Mr. Michal Tuora, Automotive & eMobility Consultant and Founder of MT Consulting, divulged, “The quick spread of the coronavirus is wreaking havoc on all manufacturing facilities worldwide, causing headcount reductions, companies shut downs and many more causing a global economic recession on all fields.”

He stated that procurement needed to evolve from our standard processes and jump into take bigger role in helping company. It was put in spot light to help and optimise many things related to cash flow, supply chain etc.

3D printing

Mr. Chevy Kok, Director of Business Development & Key Accounts, Ultimaker Asia Pacific stressed that 3D printing isn’t the future of manufacturing, it is NOW. “Our mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to digital distribution and local manufacturing,” he declared.

Chevy stated,” 3D Printing rethink supply chain through digital distribution and local manufacturing. It maximise productivity by leveraging parallel manufacturing, and Identify high value applications and track ROI.”