As a follow-up to last weeks post "Business Transformations: Moving from the Industrial to Information Economy" below are some thoughts around what various Manufacturing leaders are thinking in this new Information Age.
As manufacturers embark on their digital transformation journeys, many leaders are facing the same common challenges. Outlined below are some of the hurdles we've seen numerous times, and the leadership roles that struggle with them.
New or Existing Leader
Role: (Owner/President/CEO/COO)
As a Business Owner or Leader supporting a leading manufacturing organization you face increased pressure to remain competitive, streamline operations, and deliver more business value in an information age where new technologies and advancements in machinery are disrupting the industrial aged operations.
You are challenged with balancing and impacting these strategic areas of your business:
- Adapting to the New Normal: Embracing technology, but more importantly information. Customers are more knowledgeable and demand easy access to products and information.
- Agility in Operations: Scale was once a competitive advantage, now it is speed. Being able to quickly adapt to market trends and customer demands. Continuous process improvement, optimizing and aligning business processes with new applications and devices.
- Taking advantage of Data: Technology will be centric to everything you’re doing. Everyone will become a knowledge worker and representative of your brand. Eliminating barriers and increasing visibility to pertinent business information will be key.
IT Leader
Role: (CIO, VP, Director, Manager)
As an IT Executive supporting a leading manufacturing organization you face increased pressure to deliver more business value, maintain existing infrastructure and implement new projects all within inadequate budgets. Meanwhile converging trends in cloud, social, mobile and big data compound the complexity while creating opportunities to drive innovation and create product and service advantages.
You are challenged with balancing and impacting these strategic areas of your business:
- Lowering the cost of IT: Reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the systems required to create and service products.
- Enabling secure, global collaboration: Support the business with a secure internal and external collaboration platform that integrates with multiple systems across the value chain (Employees, Customers, Suppliers, Distributors) providing the right information, to the right people, at the right time.
- Executing the business strategy: Your IT organization is now responsible for executing on the business strategy becoming the information broker across the organization and no longer just the system maintenance team.
Sales / Service Leader
Role: (VP, Director, Manager)
As a sales or service leader, you understand the complexities for your organization to integrate the voice of the customer into your products’ early lifecycle stages, and then to continue that relationship by optimally servicing those products and customers in a meaningful way across various channels.
Often communication problems stem from disconnected systems and a lack of connection between sales, marketing, service and engineering departments. Information needs to be centralized providing a single view across the organization's customer base.
You are challenged with balancing and impacting these strategic areas of your business:
- Increase Customer Value: Exceed your customers’ expectations of its service experience and product performance to increase customer value.
- Enabling secure, global collaboration: Support the business with a secure internal and external sales and service collaboration platform sharing the right information, at the right time, to the right people across the value chain (Employees, Customers, Suppliers, Distributors)
- Gain Business Insights: Use data to better forecast, view market place trends, and drive attention to opportunities that will deliver the most value for your organization.