At the Tech For Industry Show, Patrick de Coucy, Managing Director (No Chain Technologies), Fabrice Bonneau, President (No Chain Technologies, also founder of the Argon & Co consultancy) and François Durieux, Partner(Argon & Co), a supply chain and aerospace/defense expert, presented a concrete promise: revealing and activating an industrial company's supply chain levers in just 8 weeks, illustrated with a real client case from the aerospace sector.

Argon & Co is a consulting firm specialized in operational excellence, with 1,000 people across 18 offices worldwide. No Chain Technologies is its subsidiary, a vendor of industrial planning software distinguished by two characteristics: broad coverage of the entire industrial planning process, including related functions such as quality and engineering; and the native integration of a proprietary concept called No Chain Planning. The session focuses on the platform's control tower module, called No Chain Ops Navigator.

In sectors manufacturing complex products (bills of materials with 14+ levels, multiple suppliers), around 65% of service issues stem from upstream supplier performance. A missing part at the tenth level of the bill of materials, which causes a delay three months later, is nearly impossible to detect with current tools and processes.

The "last missing part" describes a situation where every part of a complex piece of equipment is available except one — often inexpensive — which blocks final assembly. The result: a stock of raw materials and components piles up while waiting for that missing part. In sectors like aerospace, defense or rail, this phenomenon can account for up to 40% of total stock — a considerable amount, but rarely identified as such.

Before optimizing under machine or labor capacity constraints (often via algorithms seen as a "black box"), there's a real value in lifting these constraints upstream: identifying a machine overloaded for 15 days, questioning a poorly placed maintenance slot, or checking whether opening a workstation for longer actually makes sense given real component availability.

Current planning methods (MRP, 60-70 years old; DRP, more recent but poorly suited) suffer from three structural limitations: sequential planning, ill-suited to aerospace's long cycles, where a demand shift takes weeks or months to propagate; a lack of visibility into real priorities, especially at upstream levels of the bill of materials, generating unnecessary instability on what's going fine and a lack of responsiveness on what isn't; and, above all, steering based on a single signal — either unconstrained demand or current constraints — never able to compare the two.

The core concept of No Chain Planning is to continuously compare two signals: "must-do" (what each link in the chain — assembly, component manufacturing, procurement — must produce to meet customer demand, with nuances between an ideal must-do and a shortfall must-do) and "can-do" (what the company is actually capable of producing given its constraints, distinguishing external can-do, tied to available components, from total can-do, once internal constraints are added). Comparing these two signals resolves most of the blind spots identified above.

Technically, the solution massively ingests data from the client's SAP ERP, without reinventing the underlying ERP logic, while adding much more complex complementary calculations. It's presented as a European solution, a point emphasized in the aerospace and defense sector.

The client illustrated, whose name remains confidential, has been ramping up 15% a year for 4 years, with another 6 to 7 years of growth at that pace still ahead. Two classic yet coexisting problems: customer delivery delays and, at the same time, significant overstocking.

The client had committed to its shareholder to deliver 268 units for the year. Within 7 weeks (including 3 weeks to connect No Chain Ops Navigator to SAP data), the team was able to establish, for a single product family, a three-step trajectory: the ideal must-do (268 units), the external can-do once multi-tier supplier constraints were factored in (up to 19 bill-of-materials levels in this sector) — 203 units — then the total can-do once internal load-capacity constraints were added — 155 units.

Once it was established that the target wouldn't be met, the tool drills down to the operational level: which supplier, which item, and even which specific purchase order line is blocking how many units, and by when. A supplier-level view serves senior management; a purchase-order-line view directly serves buyers taking action.

On the internal capacity side, the tool identifies a zone not to exceed (where components would run short anyway), a red zone to avoid (insufficient capacity generating downstream delay) and a target zone where the company hits its goal or draws on safety margins. An intermediate gray zone also helps anticipate capacity needs linked to planned maintenance constraints.

The tool's most significant contribution, according to François Durieux, is directly linking the gap between must-do and can-do to the resulting stock level — confirming the 40% stock figure tied to the last missing part mentioned earlier. When constraints can't be lifted, the tool also helps consciously decide which product's service level to sacrifice, rather than facing the situation with no visibility.

For the aerospace client cited, deploying the control tower identified around €42 million in optimizable stock out of a total stock of around €400 million (roughly 10%), as well as freeing up 47 to 48 additional units against an annual target of around 800. In other sectors with more track record, such as dermocosmetics, stock issues are smaller but service-level gains are significant, particularly in high-growth contexts, with a constant planning headcount.

Once the last missing part is precisely identified, two types of levers open up. First, a different balance of power with the supplier: being able to precisely quantify the impact of a delay (for example, €500,000 of blocked deliveries for 3 months) fundamentally changes the nature of the conversation. Second, complementary structural actions, such as dual-sourcing strategies, run in parallel by the client.

Asked about how this fits with APS (Advanced Planning System) tools already in place, the speakers note there's no single answer: if the APS covers the downstream side (forecasting, DRP, S&OP), the control tower is seen as fully complementary; if the APS covers the MPS, the prioritization the control tower provides also remains complementary. It's only when deploying the full suite of No Chain Planning modules that the philosophy potentially becomes at odds with certain APS.

The approach presented by No Chain Technologies and Argon & Co illustrates a different way of thinking about industrial planning: rather than steering with a single signal, continuously comparing what a company must do with what it can actually do reveals costly blind spots — multi-tier supplier delays, the last missing part, poorly sized capacity — and enables action within weeks rather than months.

Watch the full session, along with the other Tech For Industry Show replays, on our dedicated page.