Top 10 Manufacturing Predictions for 2016 by IDC

To compete effectively this year and gain customers, manufacturers need to prioritize speed and scale of production as the second priority. Accuracy, responsiveness, and speed will be the key facilitator driving growth and focus for improving customer-facing processes in manufacturing.

Streamlining logistics networks by enabling greater use of 3D printing, robotics, and cognitive computing also needs to be anchored in a customer-driven quality, response, and service recovery Manufacturer, who are early adopters, have the potential to break through barriers that held them back from improving accuracy and increasing long-term customer loyalty. The General Electric Industrial Internet of Things initiative shows potential as a platform that could orchestrate these diverse technologies.

For manufacturers to attain this level of supply chain collaboration and orchestration by 2019, manufacturers need to compete with greater insight, speed and relevancy to take market share and react faster than those with past forecasting techniques.

According to IDC, a product innovation platform unifies product, manufacturing, supply chain, and service information, processes, and people thereby enabling decision support and collaboration across value chains, enabling higher product and process quality and states that such a platform will be justified based on the full life-cycle quality and a superior customer experience.

Virtual models of products customers considers buying accelerates sales cycles and simulations helps process manufacturers gain efficiency, and discrete manufacturers meet customer requirements. Leading manufacturers of engineer-to-order industrial products can translate virtual models into Bill of Materials (BOM) and process workflows today, streamlining production and making digital manufacturing a reality.

Companies will realize the short-term opportunity of using the ‘cloud’ as the fabric to establish a company-wide platform to analyzing data coming from the shop floor and converting it into actionable information for enterprise decision makers. Acumatica, Microsoft AX on Azure, NetSuite, and Plex Systems are cloud-based ERP providers who have experience scaling manufacturing operations starting at the shop floor.

Rigid, centralized factory control systems will start to give way to decentralized intelligence as machine-to-machine communications start to hit the factory floor. To support this transformation, a new generation of technology-savvy workers, with information available at their fingertips, will be needed.

Article sources:

Forbes.com – tech online – 19 December 2015

IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Manufacturing 2016 Predictions