The manufacturing industry faces new challenges

New technologies, intense global competition and regulatory requirements, such as the Supply Chain Act, are putting pressure on business entities and especially their existing business models. This forces business entities in the manufacturing industry in particular to make far-reaching changes to existing processes and to realise innovations at short notice. Manufacturing companies that want to future-proof themselves in the face of these intensifying dynamics need to make smart business decisions and bold yet sustainable investments today.

As part of our “Future Readiness Index 2020” report on the manufacturing industry, we surveyed executives on the biggest challenges facing the industry.

The agenda of manufacturing companies is dominated by multi-layered challenges and complex future issues. Key trends include changing customer needs, automation, demographic change and – due to the Covid-19 pandemic – upheavals in the world of work.

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The digital target vision as a transformation guide

In order to meet dynamic market conditions in the industrial manufacturing environment, pragmatic solutions are required in ever shorter innovation cycles. Thus, highly fragmented and outdated IT landscapes create inefficiencies in information processing. By developing a holistic digital strategy, transformation projects can be implemented in a coordinated manner, and the digital transformation can be realised in a targeted manner. This digitalisation within the business entity creates transparency across the entire supply chain, including its established processes and systems. This enables supply bottlenecks in procurement and sales logistics to be recognised at an early stage and timely reactions to changing market conditions to be realised.

The spare parts business is often one of the most important margin drivers for manufacturing business entities and especially machine builders. The best availability with the lowest possible inventories is an important competitive factor. With the help of our experts, create a tool-based holistic inventory overview and forecasting reliability across your entire supply chain network and thus permanently and sustainably reduce your costs caused by inefficiencies. We support you, for example, with an automated analysis of spare parts requirements. Connect directly with us and our experts to evaluate the viability of your supply chain.

Automation opportunities and your potential

Especially in manufacturing companies, a lot of data is generated, stored and managed, but often without recognising and exploiting the valuable benefits in it. Innovative digital solutions can improve the quality and explanatory power of data through data & analytics, making decision-making in manufacturing business entities more efficient across the board. The assumption of repetitive tasks by robotic process automation solutions can provide relief.

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Enterprise security in the digital age

With the help of a comprehensive digital compliance structure, manufacturing business entities can react quickly and purposefully to new regulatory requirements of the legislator, such as the Supply Chain Act.

In addition to taking regulatory requirements into account, we are able to create the necessary transparency along the supply chain through digital approaches such as data analytics. With the help of our tool-based solutions, you can manage any number of suppliers and evaluate the process status via correlating KPI structures.

The use of new digital technologies throughout the business entity offers numerous opportunities, but also leads to risks that threaten the existence of the company. The increased complexity of value creation networks creates the need to adequately protect industrial plants and data flows between production-relevant infrastructures from industrial espionage and manipulation in the form of cyberattacks. The protection of sensitive and company-specific data, production processes and smart products can be ensured in the long term through a holistic digital security concept and appropriate protective measures.

In the identification and analysis of structural security risks, we can fully support you with our cybersecurity experts. We are the right contact for the development and implementation of holistic security concepts to secure your cloud and legacy IT, your control and management systems in production, and your smart networked products. Our knowledge from analysing and responding to cyberattacks on manufacturing companies enables us to derive targeted measures and thus avoid costly production downtime and help ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

In addition to our subject matter and technology expertise, we bring interdisciplinary industry specifics to the fore with our “sectors” model and support our manufacturing clients with their specific challenges. Our solutions range from strategy determination and supply chain and process analysis to data analysis consulting, including cybersecurity assurance.

As an interdisciplinary supply chain partner, our Industrial Manufacturing Consulting team offers solutions with technological, data-supported and process-related implementation expertise for these challenges.

Talk to our experts for free regarding specific challenges and trends relating to your business entity. You decide which topics you would like to discuss with our experts.

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