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.
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