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

Digital Transformation of SMB Manufacturers – the opportunity to cloud-enable existing processes?

Digital Transformation of SMB Manufacturers – the opportunity to cloud-enable existing processes?
Oleg
Oleg
8 January, 2019 | 2 min for reading

Digital Transformation seems to be one of the most popular buzz everywhere these days. You can hear it everywhere in different contexts. My attitude towards “digital transformation” was careful because in many situations I’ve seen it as a slick marketing of existing technologies and processes.

Earlier today, my attention was caught by IDC report – Digital Transformation in Product Design and Development: The Opportunity for SMB Manufacturers (https://solidedge.siemens.com/en/pages/digital-transformation-in-product-design-and-development-infobrief/). The research was sponsored by Siemens PLM, so you will need to give away your email to Siemens. So, I did it and got a report. Do it as well and draw your opinion.

Public summary stated the following:

This IDC InfoBrief examines the current and future investment plans of small and medium businesses (SMBs) so that firms can see where an adjustment in their investment plans for product design and development might be appropriate. While small and midsize manufacturing firms have made major strides in improving product design and development, the competitive landscape will become increasingly demanding.

I captured two very interesting slides that I wanted to share with you. The first one is about priorities for SMB manufacturers. As you can see from this picture, pressure to improve performance, pushes SMB manufacturers to find solution that can make immediate difference in current processes.

The second slide is showing prioritization of solutions and technologies capable to give an impact for SMB manufacturers. On the top list of digital transformation accelerators, you can see SaaS and Cloud computing technologies.

What is my conclusion?  SMB manufacturers seem to be a very interesting spot. For very long period of time PLM companies failed to capture SMB opportunity. It was a result of multiple factors – cost , technologies and approach. IDC reports clearly indicates SMB opportunity that can be captured by using cloud technologies, digitally transforming current process with simple and efficient product offering. Who can do? The next few years will be interesting to watch the transformation of small manufacturing shops. Just my thoughts….

Best, Oleg

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
5 July, 2016

New technologies can redefine existing usage patterns. One of the biggest pains when you run you application on the desktop...

13 October, 2009

First of all, I’m sorry about such a topic. Yes, Usability! I think we have been talking about usability for...

11 June, 2017

  NuoDB article – Product Lifecycle Management and the Cloud written by well-known PLM analyst Jim Brown caught me by the...

23 August, 2019

I’m heading to San-Diego this weekend to present at ConX19 organized by the Institute of Process Excellence. According to IpX,...

30 November, 2014

I want to continue the discussion about data ownership and synchronization between islands of information in a company. EBOM and...

28 August, 2009

I was reading the following article “Why Excel is not Enterprise BI Solution Yet. What I liked is the way...

31 December, 2009

The idea of 3D publishing isn’t new. For the last few years we had chance to see multiple examples of...

25 March, 2015

I’m in Warwick today getting prepared for Develop3D Live conference, which will be tomorrow. The full conference agenda is here....

29 December, 2017

Few weeks ago, my attention was caught my Jim Hepplemann tweet. When I co-founded Windchill nearly 20 yrs ago, it...

Blogroll

To the top