Industrial equipment manufacturers today face unprecedented demands from their customers for more value in the products and services they provide. Meeting these increasing demands puts immense pressure on profit margins, forcing industrial equipment manufacturers to continuously improve both the products they offer and how they offer them.
It’s no longer enough for industrial equipment manufacturers simply to be good machine designers and builders. As their customers look for ways to reduce costs, many facets of equipment specification, production-line development, and maintenance have now been pushed upstream to equipment providers. Customers now demand more product customization and insist on value-add services such as line integration (pulling equipment makers and suppliers together to design and install lines), asset management, training, and leasing.
The industrial equipment market has always been supplier-centric, requiring well- planned procurement and sourcing strategies for components and subassemblies-including, integrated circuits and chips, motors, sensors, controllers, and stampings-from an array of vendors for any single piece of equipment. Reliance on part and component vendors actually increases over the life of equipment, as replacement parts (and the documentation supporting them) are vital to keep manufacturing customers up and running.
Providing these service parts is a complex undertaking, since a typical Industrial Equipment manufacturer may produce a piece of equipment incorporating hundreds or thousands of parts from a similar number of suppliers. Productively meeting customer demand has always required manufacturers to develop more than a simple buy-sell relationship with their suppliers.
Industrial equipment manufacturers need a good Information management strategy that can lead to a clearer view of customer demand, improved visibility into the supply base, and an improved ability to react to market. Such a strategy can also help to optimize schedules among production, service, and maintenance to ensure world-class customer satisfaction.
IT tools are required to proactively evaluate customer buying patterns (such as products, services, and value-add requests) and forecasting customer demand. Leading manufacturers are pursuing an organizational approach to improved IT systems and processes.The objective of IT systems is to capture and share “product” demand signals across the enterprise and its supply chain.
Triggering not only production but also offers for implementation services, post-sale asset management opportunities, and contracts for replacement parts. A demand-driven supplier network can be a strategic weapon, but only if supply-chain visibility provides every partner with not just information, but also knowledge-actionable data that allows effective planning and scheduling to fulfill customer demand.
At SteepGraph, we understand your Business Goals, Business Processes and Challenges. We have vast experience serving customers in Industrial Equipment industry. It helps us to understand industry’s business processes, functional best practices, compliances & standards, growth hindrances and key challenges of the industry. Apart from industry functional knowledge, SteepGraph has specialized skills in Enterprise Software and IT infrastructure related to PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), Business Process Management, Project Management, Product Data Management, Collaboration, Efficiency Improvement, Supplier Management and Enterprise Resource Management.
With Conglomeration of Industry skills and Software skills, SteepGraph helps its customers to achieve measurable growth and competitive edge with consulting, Lean Enterprise Process Implementation, Enterprise Software Integration, Training and Support.