Putting yourself in the position of your customers to truly understand their challenges is key to planning how to engage them. Without this perspective, opportunities to adjust or correct the approach can easily be missed. Here are three challenges that global manufacturers commonly face that their existing and would-be suppliers regularly overlook:
Challenge 1: Protection of brand equity. For many manufacturers their organization is built around their product brands. As many expand operations globally to reduce costs or to take advantage of emerging markets, the control of their production processes and product quality can be compromised. To protect their brand, consider the story of how a supplier can enhance the expanding systems and technologies that help to get the production right quickly and facilitate the link between multiple sites for overall customer benefit.
Challenge 2: Managing operational scale. Most large manufacturers have numerous production sites and business units that create a complex organization of disparate sub-businesses and systems. Change is hard to implement and clarity at the top-level is hard to gain. The best suppliers will understand and construct their brand story and offering around supporting the management and integration of disparate systems bringing many large complex separate operations together.
Challenge 3: Decision-making and control. All manufacturers will have an enormous amount and volume of data to manage, interpret and act on for the continual improvement of production capacity and margin. A well-positioned IT vendor can grab attention if they present the capability to integrate multiple streams of data and deliver actionable insight that can be visualized and used for decision-making.
Read more about how to think like a manufacturer, not just an IT vendor or technology supplier, in our latest Executive Insight Report – ‘Thinking like a global manufacturer’.
