A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Business As Usual Is Not An Option For Manufacturers

Business As Usual Is Not An Option For Manufacturers
Oleg
Oleg
26 May, 2010 | 1 min for reading

An interesting research done by Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by Siemens PLM Software and Microsoft. You can get this report via this link. The fundamental outcome of the report is as following is that despite general optimism, manufacturers are very concerned about the future of their business and the overall impact.

  • Producers are confident in their ability to innovate—a central aspect of high-value manufacturing—but most acknowledge they will have to continue to boost their innovative capabilities. Over the past year, 40% increased their investments in research and development, while 19% took on board more highly skilled workers.
  • However, manufacturers cite some big obstacles to innovation and new product and service development, including costs (53% of respondents), uncertainty about customer demand (39%) and lack of appropriate in-house skills (38%). To overcome some of these hurdles, many are prepared to partner in the coming year: with suppliers (57%), large corporate clients (42%), technology providers (39%) and consumers (22%).
  • Almost one in five is even prepared to partner with a rival, to share resources in the face of competition, and two-thirds say that they are already actively engaged in “open innovation”, sharing ideas with third parties rather than trying to develop them entirely in-house.
  • Many manufacturers (36% of the survey sample) are now developing products for the green market, or making their processes more eco-friendly. In some cases, this is driven by consumer demand; in others by regulatory pressure.

What, in my view, software vendors can take from this? Manufacturers will continue to be challenged and will be interested to change the way they are doing business. The most important aspect is control over the product cost and material cost. To have a solution, here can be an interesting opportunity. In the meantime, there is nothing on the horizon.

Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
27 November, 2014

MBOM (Manufacturing BOM) is a tough problem. Initially, you might think about it as an easy problem. Especially, since companies...

7 July, 2009

I think everybody wants to be open these days. We are moving from the closed world to the open world....

30 November, 2012

The topic of CAD (or 3D CAD) in the cloud is getting more traction. The first “CAD in the Cloud”...

11 December, 2022

Hardware is hard. This phrase is quite popular among people involved in the creation of manufacturing businesses or how it...

3 May, 2012

It is hard to find a day without new announcement or breaking news related to the cloud these days. Companies...

23 January, 2022

Manufacturing companies are under pressure to deliver innovative products faster and at a lower price. At the same time, manufacturing...

4 October, 2017

Do you think your business cannot be cannibalized by Amazon? I wrote about it few months ago – Is PLM...

24 July, 2023

The summer is at its peak. It is a great time to slow down to reflect on what happened so...

27 November, 2013

Security is one of the most fundamental things in enterprise systems. If you think about every enterprise system as a...

Blogroll

To the top