How Indian equipment manufacturers can ensure quality, cut costs, and still stay competitive.

This is good time to be in the manufacturing industry. Market demand is soaring for all the verticals in this space -white goods manufacturers, defense production, industrial equipment manufacturers, automotive, and automotive component manufacturers.

The flip side is that pressures are also mounting. Market requirements and buying patterns are changing, and customers are continuously calling for 'more variety, more often'.

While the number of new products per year has doubled, the volume of bulk products has halved - setting up a situation where a manufacturer's biggest challenge is how to get his new product to the market FIRST. Also, the fierce competition means that new products must be continuously fed into the market to retain brand mind share.

Challenges faced by manufacturing industry

The most urgent issue is the need to cut down on delivery time; which in turns means the need to reduce design time cycles.

Other areas of concern include:

• Pressure from global competition to lower cost
• Stringent quality considerations - in order to compete with global products.
• Customer demands for lower maintenance cost, faster response to service calls.
• Lack of skilled manpower available, plus difficulty in retaining existing resources. After losing many such resources to the IT industry (thanks to the perception of IT as a higher-paying industry), the spin-off effect is the drastically increased costs in lower and middle management.
   

Can IT solutions help?

Based on current loopholes in available solutions (from standard ERP to the much-misunderstood PLM), and future forecasts for this market, any long-term solution must offer at least the following:

1. Reuse knowledge, learn from history
2. Break down, don't build up
3. Standardize
4. Automate routine processes
5. Implement concurrent engineering
6. Integrate multiple functions in single platform

Does such a solution exist?

Yes. Welcome to WRENCH IME, designed specifically for this industry's needs and challenges.