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
16 September, 2010

Email is playing a significant role in the way every organization is management today. Organizations are run by emails these...

15 June, 2009

I’ve been observing a lot of discussion related to the topic of social networking. During the last few months, I...

24 November, 2023

In the PLM data management, Excel has long been considered the most popular tool. As all my product lifecycle management...

15 April, 2011

The first day at COFES 2011 over. I hope, you had a chance to follow COFES 2011 via twitter (COFES2011). If...

24 December, 2015

Written by Mike Thomas & Oleg Shilovitsky  Holidays is coming and this is a good moment to experiment and bring...

25 January, 2019

It is not a secret that PLM has strong roots in engineering. PLM was born as an extension of CAD...

15 February, 2013

Cloud is trending and we can see more examples of how cloud technologies applies in business. PLM vendors are not...

30 August, 2010

I read the following article “Oracle v Google: Why?“. I found it as a very deep analysis of the latest...

4 June, 2019

I missed 2019 CIMdata Industry and Market forum earlier this year in Ann Arbor, MI. Stan Przybylinski of CIMdata was...

Blogroll

To the top