Introduction

Once a secondary capability, customer experience (CX) has expanded into a core strategic necessity for process manufacturers. In process manufacturing, however, customer experience is no longer determined exclusively by commercial teams such as sales and marketing, but is instead delivered (or broken) by the supply chain.

The Journey From
Digitization to Orchestration

While the manufacturing sector as a whole has made significant progress in digitizing supply chain transactions, true collaboration between vendors, partners, and suppliers remains difficult because of the inherently fragmented nature of today’s supply chains. Even though many organizations have successfully transitioned from manual processes to digital workflows, enabling faster and more reliable information exchange, digitization alone does not equate to in-depth collaboration.

Notably, this lack of collaborative ability is not a failure on the part of manufacturers, but merely a sign that there is still ground to cover on the roadmap to digital maturity. Digitization provides manufacturing organizations with faster transaction capabilities, but gaining the full benefits of that speed requires further efforts to enable shared decision-making across companies through orchestration.