How Organizations Can Successfully Satisfy New Market Demands?

Diego Tamburini, the manufacturing industry strategist at Autodesk, examines what manufacturers must do to successfully satisfy new market demand amid the quick changes driving the present industrial revolution.

Here Are My Recommendations for How Organizations Can Satisfy New Demands in the Market

1. Empower Customers

Customers want to feel special and are willing to pay a premium for it. This empowerment can take two forms:

A greater say in the creation of the goods they purchase by collaborating with the team in charge of creating the product. Manufacturers are under pressure to find ways to make their walls more porous to the outside world and implement procedures that will allow for close collaboration between all parties. Nevertheless, they are also seeing the possibility because it not only increases consumer loyalty but also because the best ideas frequently originate from sources outside the organization. Various businesses are experimenting with this through crowdsourcing, design challenges, community building, and social listening, including FirstBuild, GE, Unilever, and Autodesk.

The capacity to customize items to satisfy the specific demands and wants of clients. It takes a lot of work to develop this skill because it affects how items are created, produced, and distributed. Some people might need to switch from mass production to mass customization.

2. Satisfy Fragmented Demand

Manufacturers must position themselves to meet a demand that is becoming more fragmented as a result of demographic changes and requests for greater personalization. The Mini Cooper, which offers hundreds of customization possibilities and is produced by BMW on demand, is a perfect example of this in action.

Manufacturers must have the ability to produce lower quantities of variants while staying as close to the client as feasible to meet this fragmented demand.

3. This Requires Two Mutually Complementary Strategies

Being able to swiftly and affordably transition from producing one product to another in the same factory is what flexible manufacturing is all about. This calls for the modularization of machinery (i.e., tools that can be rearranged and moved throughout the plant), as well as the use of less-fixed technologies like 3D printing and intelligent robotics.

The goal of distributed manufacturing is to strategically place a network of (smaller) facilities to better meet the demands of regional markets. A product coming from one factory in the network may be partially constructed and later differentiated by one of these distributed factories, or they could create the full product.

By creating products that are simpler to configure and lowering the need for bespoke fixtures and production processes, design can also assist in meeting fragmented demand.

Naturally, businesses must first comprehend the idea of fragmented demand. Manufacturers must interact with their local markets to learn about local regulations and preferences

4. Increase Agility

The ability to quickly respond to change, recover from shocks, bring innovations to market faster, create intellectual property more quickly, adopt new technology, and adjust to changes in the corporate, economic, or social environment are all examples of agility.

Since agility will be more and more necessary for manufacturers to be competitive, it must be elevated to a strategic level. For some people, this will entail letting go of the old business models that relied on economies of scale, massive manufacturing facilities, protracted product cycles, and mass production.

5. Master Product Complexity

With more electronics, software, connection, and innovative materials, products are becoming more complex. As a result, design demands a degree of sophistication that has never been seen before, and manufacturers must now gain in-depth knowledge of multidisciplinary methodologies, sophisticated simulation, new production technologies, and materials.

Designing complex products requires the use of systems thinking. Designers must define the architecture of the product (today, a system), grasp the interdependencies and trade-offs among disciplines, and the interconnection to other systems. They may no longer jump from the specifications to the description of the product's geometry. Moreover, items can now be viewed as nodes in a wider network of related products that communicate with one another to work together to complete a task. As a result, system-level optimization must be done rather than product-level optimization.

6. Connect Products and Build an Analytical Muscle

Manufacturers may improve client experiences by connecting their products, and they can also gain useful insight from the information that their sensors collect.

Also, updating software is made simpler for the manufacturer when goods are connected. Consider Tesla as an example. The electric car manufacturer has been providing over-the-air updates to its Model S for years, but its autopilot update recently upped the ante. The wireless update effectively transforms these automobiles into autonomous vehicles.

To do this, you must develop your data analytics skills. Data is the "new oil," as the adage goes, and the capacity to get insight from it is quickly emerging as a competitive differentiator in manufacturing. As an illustration, paying special attention to client demand, economic trends, expenses, operational efficiencies, and the discovery of new prospects. Also, the capacity to create mitigation and response plans in advance and to simulate any operational disruptions.

7. Introduce Innovative Services & Business Models

Manufacturers can add value by providing associated services like predictive maintenance, energy, and operations optimization, and design optimization by connecting items and collecting data about their performance around the clock. PaaS (product as a service) aims to increase long-term loyalty and maximize utilization of the product.

The largest change since the beginning of the industrial revolution is about to happen. We will experience more change as a result of these developments in the coming decade than many incumbents have in their lifetimes. These advancements are not only profound but happening

quickly. Those who can adapt to these changes, embrace the technologies at their disposal, and meet new needs will succeed in the future of manufacturing.


Written by Venkata Kishore Sreemalle