Industrial Manufacturing Industry Overview
The challenges are daunting: Diverse suppliers, multilevel manufacturing, highly engineered products, global logistics lanes and modes, aftermarkets, outsourcing, offshoring, globalized competition, and extremely demanding customers are all just the tip of the iceberg.
However, opportunities abound to boost supply chain efficiency, to lower costs, and ultimately, to grow the customer base and increase customer loyalty.
The world economy has been a perilous place since 2008. The United States is slowly recovering from the worst economy since the Great Depression, while the Eurozone, as whole, is actually performing worse than it did in the early 1930s. The Chinese economy also shows ominous signs of slowing. All of these economic headwinds increase uncertainty and volatility, inhibit growth, and put pressure on margins.
Product life cycles are shortening, putting increased pressure on successful new product introduction (NPI) processes. Customer requirements are changing faster than ever before. Companies need to constantly increase their agility and must operate even faster just to keep pace.
