Every player in manufacturing today faces a similar global challenge: balancing the need to grow and rapidly take new products to market while lowering costs in an open trade environment.
The dynamics required to do this are complex. Customers are punishing manufacturers that offer commodity products, and they demand increasingly more innovation. Manufacturers must shorten the time it takes to design new products and give customers what they want – or risk major losses to competitors.
At the same time, competition is getting more intense. Lowered trade barriers enable more manufacturers to compete on a global basis. This creates and advantage for those that established a lower-cost, global strategy to manage labor, material and transportation costs.
How are leading manufacturers coping? They are exploring new product development practices to strategically improve product lifecycle management. In a recent survey done by the Aberdeen Group, more than half of all manufacturing respondents said the largest issue they faced was shrinking product development times to increase profitability.
With resources globally dispersed, manufacturers must interact efficiently and collaborate in real time with an extended supply chain. And original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are relying more on suppliers to increase quality while reducing costs.
The Product Innovation Agenda Benchmark Report
AberdeenGroup surveyed and interviewed more than 125 companies across the globe to better understand corporate objectives for product portfolios, challenges they face in developing profitable products, actions to reach strategic product goals, and technical enablers that help companies improve product innovation..
Download the Aberdeen Research Paper PDF, 947K
The increasing complexity of this environment has spotlighted the need to eliminate inconsistencies in product design, creation and production. Enormous amounts of information must constantly change hands on a global basis, and protecting intellectual property has become increasingly difficult.
By taking advantage of the latest product lifecycle management techniques, manufacturers are finding opportunities to not only decrease their time to market but also increase revenue and profit.
Additional Information
Download the Product Lifecycle Management industry business issue overview PDF, 1.2M