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Manufacturing is no longer simply the production of goods and services. In today’s Experience Economy, value comes from how a customer uses a product, not the product itself. This makes manufacturing a process of value creation. To be successful, companies must create value networks in which the real and the virtual merge to create new ways of conducting business.
So what are value networks? They go beyond the traditional,  linear supply chain model by breaking down barriers between industrial trading partners, producers and maker and introducing new business models for delivering sustainable innovations to consumers. They create a shift to a network of multiple suppliers and trading partners who are selected based on their capabilities, responsiveness and ability to be agile.
With technology allowing companies to work in both the real and virtual world, manufacturers can more easily replicate and modify product designs and manufacturing processes. To meet both time to market and profit goals, manufacturers need to quickly and easily identify, hire and collaborate with the best partner for each task.
Marketplaces are emerging to help match makers with suppliers, giving manufacturers access not only to their preselected suppliers but to an extended ecosystem for industrial services. Platforms help streamline cross-functional and cross-organizational collaboration and sharing of best practices to identify and quickly leverage past successes. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform uniquely removes technology barriers for design and manufacturing by offering a common view into and access to data, regardless of company size or location, allowing for multiple stakeholders to participate in the value network and work from a single source of the truth. And because of the digital continuity inherent in a value network, it is possible for the manufacturer to manage a wide variety of actors, benchmark performance among different factories as well as have full traceability.
Value networks are emerging more in part due to the new types of companies – or divisions of existing companies – popping up in Industry Renaissance we are currently undergoing. These enterprises are not beholden to an existing set of suppliers or traditional supply chain, and as part of their overall business model they are approaching everything about their new business ventures with a blank slate. A flexible value network with a dynamic set of business partners allows for great agility and speed, critical in today’s economy. This openness is also triggering trading partners and suppliers, who were traditionally competing, to increasingly cooperate.
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