Industry Update, Australia: Cognizant Experts Outline a Roadmap to speed Manufacturing’s Digital Business Transformation
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“To succeed in today’s competitive market, manufacturers need to embrace technologies that encompass social, mobile, analytics and cloud. This combination can deliver the operational excellence, agility, innovation and customer-centricity required to remain relevant with customers, business partners and the manufacturing ecosystem,” write Cognizant’s Badrinath Setlur, Assistant Vice President of Manufacturing Consulting, and Christopher Andreas, Senior Director, Manufacturing and Logistics, ANZ. “Emerging digital technologies are enabling businesses worldwide to transform. Their customers are clear winners, benefiting from unprecedented information availability, product choices and channel options.” Excerpts:
“The race to identify and deliver on ever-changing customer needs is gaining momentum. To succeed, manufacturers need to commit to four key interconnected mandates to leverage emerging digital technology:
- Operational excellence: Productivity and efficiency across processes and functions.
- Agility: Response to internal and external changes.
- Innovation: Initiatives leading to cost reductions and new revenue opportunities.
- Customer centricity: Meeting customer expectations.
To check progress, manufacturers must assess three organizational attributes: leadership support, execution mechanisms and performance management, through KPI tracking and management accountability.
The technology helping manufacturers to move forward keeps evolving, changing the ways in which products are made, service is delivered and business conducted. Embedded technologies enable manufactured products to be more ‘informed’, while innovative new products and services are disrupting traditional supply chains through new channel options. Customers are demanding new levels of customization.
Today’s objective is to use technology to do the same things in far more efficient and effective ways. In order to prosper, manufacturing companies need to master four interconnected mandates of technology-led innovation: operational excellence, agility, innovation and customer-centricity.
To assess and build effective digital capabilities, manufacturers need a comprehensive framework plus a structured method that helps to formulate a strategy, lay out an execution process, and develop comprehensive performance management for tracking progress.
Digital leaders have a head start over other manufacturers and are enjoying a significant competitive advantage. The others need to understand how they can maximize the impact of a new approach. Fully adopting implemented technologies is critical to producing the business performance impact desired and, in turn, ensure market relevance with partners and customers.”
Click below to read the article, first published in Industry Update, Australia’s leading publication for the manufacturing sector.
