FORGING LINKLESS SUPPLY CHAIN
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The Dark WRIT TEN BY
JOHN O’HANLON PRODUCED BY
TOM VENTURO
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SigmaPoint is poised to reinvigorate electronics manufacturing in North America. The Canadian provider of electronics manufacturing services (EMS) has refined its lean manufacturing practices over a decade, and is now on a journey to a truly disruptive supply chain solution
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ith increasing unease over the imposition of tariffs on goods and materials imported into the USA, manufacturers and design-
ers are concentrating their attention on the likely 04
effect of ever escalating disincentives to the offshoring model. There are plenty of other reasons to look anew at the advantages of bringing as much as possible of the value chain back, among them the reducing labor cost advantages and, as innovation takes a front seat, the need to protect and control IP. It’s against this background that the SigmaPoint Technologies has launched a five-year project that will seriously disrupt the traditional end-to-end supply chain and lead the electronics industry toward a much more highly automated model. In just 19 years the Cornwall Ontario based company has grown from zero to nearly 300 employees, partnering with major OEMs such as General Dynamics and Kontron through its commitment to lean manufacturing and its triple focus on simplicity, velocity and value add. As
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“When you get into the prescriptive and predictive portions of the AI interface … you’re actually starting to enter a future state where you’re able to look at the variables without any human interface” — Leah Slaughter, VP of Supply Chain, Sigmapoint
Sylvain Duval, SigmaPoint’s Director of
bringing certain products back to
Customer Experience, says: “We have
North America. Being a Canadian
been able to demonstrate to our
entity, our customers are burdened by
customers the solid business case for
no tariffs whatever.” Thus, being
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Duval. “That is why SigmaPoint is trying
of market factors favoring Sig-
to build the EMS global supply chain of
maPoint’s growth – but the chief
the future. We are putting together the
advantage of this company lies in its
building blocks so that we can maintain
commitment to innovation.
our competitive advantage and enable
A key factor, currently and over the
our original equipment manufacturing
coming five years, is its leveraging of
(OEM) customers to bring back their
artificial intelligence (AI) and machine
projects from Asia to North America.”
learning (ML) when it comes to
The project proper had its birth in
competing with Asia. China will always
2017 at SigmaPoint’s facility within the
be able to undercut on labor so what
new privately-funded tech accelerator
more can SigmaPoint do? “We know
Catalyst137 at Kitchener. This focuses
that to be able to compete effectively
on NPI and fast prototyping, with an
we have to find ways of removing every
eye to volume production at the
bit of waste and inefficiency,” says
Cornwall factory. The government has w w w.si gma po in t . com
“ We have been able to demonstrate to our customers the solid business case for bringing certain products back to North America” — Sylvain Duval, Director of Customer Experience, Sigmapoint
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encouraged the creation of a ‘super-
Response, the software platform that
cluster’ of companies working together
was chosen by VP of Supply Chain
to share IP and move toward next-gen-
Leah Slaughter based on a long
eration manufacturing, he explains.
acquaintance. “It is truly the most
“Catalyst137 spearheaded the creation
flexible piece of software that I have
of our AI/ML project together with key
ever found throughout my entire
customers, suppliers and our technical
career,” she states. “With the amount
partner Kinaxis.”
of intelligence that we are building into
Kinaxis is the developer of Rapid
the prescriptive interface, this was the
09 only tool that could handle the
with processes continuously running
intricacies that I wanted to build into
without human intervention. “Achieving
the AI/ML model.” Kinaxis is a key
this will bring us a huge competitive
partner in the project, which brings in
advantage through risk mitigation in
manufacturers like ON Semiconductor,
the supply chain, with a platform that
distributors including Arrow Electron-
can plan its own way through and out
ics and Future Electronics and OEM
of exceptions and pitfalls that occur,
customers Miovision and L3 Wescam
leveraging deep and continuous
– all with connections to the Catalyst137
machine learning.”
facility. It places SigmaPoint right at the
The part that is not, and probably
center of a heavily populated hub of
never will be fully automated, she calls
start-ups and OEMs that are geared
the control tower. This is the human
toward IoT innovations.
interface that monitors the process,
The goal by 2022 is to comprehen-
constantly reprogramming the
sively automate the supply chain so
machine as exceptions are encoun-
that 90% of it is running in a ‘dark state’
tered. The jobs will not always be the w w w.si gma po in t . com
supply chain professional roles of today, but might require a ‘control tower architect,’ an ‘AI programmer’ or an ‘AI profile exception specialist.’ “Artificial intelligence and machine learning on their own are really just a process automation but it’s when you get into the prescriptive and predictive portions of the AI interface, and into deep learning in the machine learning portion of it, that you’re actually starting to enter a future state where you’re able to look at the variables without any human interface. The 10 E X E C U T I V E P R OF IL E
Leah Slaughter Leah has close to 20+ years of extensive experience in Supply Chain and redesigning end-to-end supply chains evaluating where supply chain resources are best deployed to maximize company revenue and improve customer delivery performance by using an assessment of strategic risk for the company through strategic sourcing, demand intake, supply chain management, procurement, materials management, manufacturing, logistics and customer service. Leah’s experience with component distribution, various multinational EMS providers, OEM’s as well as consulting for Supply Chain process and applications has allowed her to share her knowledge and manage teams of up to 150+ people. Graduating with honours and on the Dean’s List, Leah received Diploma’s in Materials Management & Distribution and Marketing & Business Administration from Sir Sandford Fleming College.
control tower will always be a piece of the puzzle though, because we need intuition built-in to some of these decisions. We need to regularly re-programme the artificial interface to ensure that the right things are being learnt by the machine and that the next decision that it makes will be correct.” AI and ML, then, have the potential to make existing practice efficient, but even today supply chain is seen as a very linear, end-to-end process. SigmaPoint looked for a holistic model that would link each of the nodes direct to the digital core in real time. “The linear model introduces latency as it
E X E C U T I V E P R OF IL E
Sylvain Duval He has more than 27 years’ experience in New Production introduction in the high-tech sector. He worked 10 years at Nortel Networks as Test Engineering Director and Sr Product Line manager. He then followed an entrepreneurship career path working as Test engineering Director for Ceyba (Ultra Long haul Optical networking Start up) in early 2000 , co funding his own startup Daito Test services in 2003 and co-funding Jordale technology in 2006. Sylvain went back in the EMS world as Customer Service Director at Varitron before joining Sigmapoint. He holds a Bachelor Degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master degree in Concurrent Engineering from Sherbrooke University.
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moves from node to node,” says Slaughter. “When we looked at spanning eight internal nodes with seven external supply nodes, upstream and downstream to give a full and entire supply chain solution leading to the dark state, we knew we had to 12
connect the OEMs, the EMS, the distributor and the manufacturer.” Her vision is to transcend the nodes or links in the supply chain conflating them in a compressed ‘super node’, always turned on, always transparent, and all powered up by Kinaxis Rapid Response. Collaboration across the nodes, from the outset, was the always the key, emphasizes Duval. “AI and ML are
“Catalyst137 spearheaded the creation of our AI/ML project together with key customers, suppliers and our technical partner Kinaxis” — Sylvain Duval, Director of Customer Experience, Sigmapoint
buzzwords in the supply chain world but we are different in that we involved our partners right from the beginning, asking them to identify the upstream or downstream issues we could help solve with this new approach.” The project remains at this stage an active development between SigmaPoint and its partners, but its effect is already being felt in the vibrant digital nexus emerging in Ontario, with startups, innovators and established players supporting the next generation of IoT companies. It is due to be unveiled by Slaughter in Washington DC in October to a broader population of supply chain professionals at Kinexions 18 the annual conference of Kinaxis. “I think the AI/ML project will attract much attention and potentially, with the partners that we are involved with and leveraging right now, it will change the supply chain landscape over the next five years to what we hope will be a revolutionary state.”
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