This is the first of a four-blogpost mini-series designed around digital transformation in manufacturing. The remaining three posts will be published throughout the course of the following weeks.  

For manufacturers, it’s never been so crucial to ensure products reach customers quickly, at low cost, and with the highest quality. But unfortunately, not every unit that comes off the production line is perfect. To address this discrepancy head-on, manufacturers need to go back to the drawing board and make sure to hone their efforts around three key metrics: time-to-market, quality, and cost. Together, these three elements work in synergy to ignite the revenue and profitability each product generates for the company. 

By prioritizing time-to-market, quality, and cost metrics, top performing manufacturers set themselves up for greater efficiencies across the board. However, not all organizations are “Top Performers.” In fact, according to Aberdeen data, a median of just one in three products achieve manufacturing objectives for time-to-market and quality and cost—while the likelihood of five out of six products doing so is just 5%. By looking to their high-performing peers, companies can gain insights into the strategies and technologies they should implement to boost their ability to deliver the desired results.

Aberdeen defines the following groups in our latest survey of 262 manufacturing and engineering leaders, based on their performance in time-to-market, quality, and cost:

This blog series will explore each of these groups to discover what they are doing well and what they can do better.

Top Performing Manufacturers Promote Agility and Growth

The main difference between Top Performers and their competitors is their adoption of capabilities and technologies to support business agility. Top Performers recognize the importance of agility to both keep a pulse on the market for predicting demand and fueling innovation and to quickly adjust operational processes and proactively respond to changing market needs. Those who are falling flat with revenue, missing the mark, or lagging behind the rest are still in the process of transforming their businesses, and they have yet to implement critical capabilities to support agility. Top Performers are more likely to implement agile process optimization capabilities than all other groups (see figure below).

Figure: Process Optimization is a High Priority for Top Performing Organizations

With processes in place to capture ideas from employees, customers, and suppliers, top performing manufactures can enable innovation more effectively than all other organizations. They have more feedback to support product updates and new product introductions. They are also more likely to dynamically update processes as new best practices emerge. This allows them to keep up with their competitors and quickly implement changes to internal workflows to streamline both decision-making and operations. 

Keep in mind that in some cases, the only difference between top-performing organizations and their counterparts is having the right technology stack to help streamline operations. 

Improve Efficiency and Quality While Reducing Costs with a High-Performance Technology Stack

When it comes to boosting revenue and profitability in manufacturing and engineering, nothing helps support that effort like a high-performance technology stack. Investing in the right technology skyrockets results in time-to-market, quality, cost, and revenue. 

QMS, MOM/MES, and manufacturing intelligence are among the top solutions that high performing organizations turn to for their operational needs. Visibility into quality at every stage of the product lifecycle ensures only high-quality products make it into the hands of their customers. Visibility into manufacturing operations and the analysis capabilities to identify areas to make improvements can help leaders cut costs and increase production speed. Lean enablement software also helps cut the cost of raw materials by optimizing raw material utilization.

CAD and PLM are among the most common engineering solutions in place by top performing organizations, which demonstrates their dedication to high quality and low costs from design to testing to production to the field. CAD software allows product developers to easily create and test different parts and materials, especially when integrated with other engineering solutions such as simulation and virtual prototyping. 

Connected engineering applications streamline the design process to keep product schedules on track, and they can optimize manufacturability to minimize costs and time required to produce every design going into manufacturing. Investing in a high-performance tech stack can help those who are missing the mark improve their time-to-market, quality, and cost effectiveness to catch up to their competitors.

Deploy the Right Strategies to Improve Your Manufacturing and Engineering Operations Today 

To find greater success in time-to-market, quality, cost, and revenue as well as annual improvements in average product revenue and other key business metrics, organizations should look to:

  • Prioritize agility to respond to changes in customer demand and market disruptions.
  • Develop greater visibility into operational, customer, and business data.
  • Utilize a comprehensive manufacturing and engineering tech stack to improve efficiency and quality while reducing costs.

By keeping these three strategies in mind today, manufacturers and engineering leaders can begin to make the changes necessary for a more profitable tomorrow. 

Nobody’s perfect, so if you’re not in the Top Performers group yet, that’s okay! The next post in this blog series will focus on manufacturers who are Falling Flat with Revenue and the steps they can take to achieve their revenue goals.