Engagement in manufacturing
Engaging customers, partners and employees streamlines processes, improves communications, and build relationships and profitability
For manufacturers, engagement—a strong, lasting connection with customers, partners, and employees—can offer tangible, bottom-line benefits by improving product quality, reducing production costs, and strengthening supplier and customer relationships. Strategies to improve engagement in manufacturing must build on existing, proven systems and enable companies to integrate global project teams and customers more fully and securely into everyday processes. Typically, more engaging and interactive buying experiences result in higher sales and happier customers—and play an important role in helping companies differentiate their brands from competitors. From this perspective, a strong engagement strategy is critical to a manufacturer’s success.
Increasing complexity, rising expectations drive need to engage
More than 50 percent of manufacturing collaboration still occurs outside core enterprise systems and is driven largely by manual processes. Over the past five years, manufacturers have spent more than $50 billion implementing ERP, product lifecycle management (PLM), and other enterprise systems. The good news is that the returns have been strong, with companies enjoying faster, more efficient processes and accelerated product time-to-market. Yet manufacturing today is more complex than ever. Global supply chains and outsourced production have replaced regional supplier and partner networks. At the same time, customers worldwide now expect a wider array of products and services—all at lower costs. Manufacturers must rethink their business strategies so as to meet these rising expectations and better engage with their customers.
Engagement extracts additional value from existing enterprise systems
Effective engagement requires extending the value of existing enterprise systems to support real-time collaboration and information sharing across teams. This means overcoming the problems of information silos—where only certain groups have direct access to select pieces of information—and integrating solutions that get the right information to and from development partners, suppliers, and distributors at the right time. Dispersed partners need access to a steady stream of information, regardless of whether it originated in PLM, ERP, CRM, or other systems. Using engaging software solutions, collaborators can receive manufacturing details packaged and presented in a reliable, universal digital format and also add comments and communicate in real-time with everyone involved in design and production. Integrated processes minimize design errors, high costs, and production delays long familiar to manufacturers, resulting in more engaging experiences for partners and collaborators.
Many of the problems most commonly faced by manufacturers can be addressed by implementing engagement strategies.
- A U.S. manufacturer does some product design in house and works with additional engineers in Europe and the Middle East to design components. This demands that collaborating designers have quick, reliable access to everyone’s work—something ill-suited to paper. In addition, finalized product designs are sent to a manufacturing plant in Asia for production. As confidential project materials move around the world, the manufacturer needs a reliable document format to reassure users that sensitive information is protected and that intentional or accidental changes cannot be made to designs approved for production.
- For manufacturers, managing dozens of versions of project documents outside of enterprise or PLM systems is daunting. For example, a particular component can go through ten rounds of reviews with people inside and outside an organization, including procurement, QA, suppliers, contract designers, outsourced manufacturers, and others. With so many people reviewing and commenting on materials, there is no guarantee that everyone has the specialized design tools to open materials and provide input. A single, reliable format such as Adobe PDF is crucial for packaging and presenting a range of manufacturing details to a broad audience.
- A large part of revenues for many manufacturers comes from maintenance and support services, with leading companies attributing as much as 50% to 80% of revenues to these services. With customers worldwide, manufacturers now rely on a global network of regional service providers to address customer needs. Manufacturers must be able to work quickly and effectively with providers and customers to complete contracts, collaborate on problems, and deliver timely, professional support.
- Addressing compliance requirements is traditionally a document-intensive process. With so many manufacturers, suppliers, and other outside partners working together to bring products to market, companies need to closely track the products and services provided by each partner. Having detailed documentation on hand is essential if government regulators or other entities question a company’s manufacturing processes or the make up of components used in final products.
- Complex products require in-depth and frequent customer and partner training. Using the Internet and advanced eLearning tools, manufacturers can better engage customers in cost-effective, high-quality training programs.
- Automobile manufacturers are incorporating dynamic tools on their web sites, including many based on Adobe’s Flash and web solutions, that enable buyers to visually customize the cars of their dreams and then connect directly with local dealers to schedule test drives of the models.
Bridging the engagement gap
Increasingly, manufacturers are turning to Adobe software to integrate people, systems, project materials, and processes into more secure, automated workflows. By leveraging Adobe solutions and the ubiquitous Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash software, manufacturers can bridge the gaps between employees, suppliers, partners, and customers and the variety of applications they use. In addition, Adobe solutions bring more dynamic, ad hoc collaboration processes to manufacturing, as opposed to the highly structured workflows in ERP and PLM systems.
With the increased complexity of today’s manufacturing supply chain, a strong engagement strategy is more important than ever. Adobe solutions enable manufacturers to create engaging experiences that streamline processes, improve communications, and ultimately build relationships and profitability.
