Page 56 - MetalForming April 2015

Customer is King
It’sTime for an ERP Epiphany in Complex Manufacturing
For complex manufacturers to compete, they must revolutionize their IT-manufacturing strategy to put the customer, not production alone, at the center of their operations.
BY LOUIS COLUMBUS
Enterprise resource planning (ERP), pricing, services and sup- ply-chain systems designed for high-volume business models aren’t scaling to the quickening cadence of customers and their more complex
Louis Columbus is vice president of marketing at iBASEt and a contributor to Forbes.com. He also teaches MBA courses in international business, glob- al competitive strategies, international market research, and capstone courses in strategic planning and market research. He can be reached on Twitter at @LouisColumbus.
demands on manufacturers.
From the complex manufacturers
who built their businesses by boot- strapping special projects into products to those with global operations in dozens of nations, all are facing a sim- ilar challenge: how to make legacy manufacturing systems designed for volume deliver customer value instead. For many complex manufacturers, the challenge involves making their infor- mation technology (IT)-manufactur- ing systems deliver valuable, customer- centric insight and intelligence when they were designed purely for produc- tion efficiency.
Symptoms can be found everywhere in a manufacturing business when IT systems are mismatched with the com- pany’s current business model—and most importantly—its customers. Incomplete or error-filled quotes, incorrect orders that need multiple reworking cycles in production, lost orders and build-to-order products that the company can’t produce at a profit are just a few of these symptoms.
The solution is not to just speed up existing systems to get more done at current levels—that’s just automating mediocrity. Efficiency has never made
a manufacturer more customer- focused. What’s needed is a complete- ly new approach to defining IT strate- gies, taking into account the varying cadences of customers and their unique product and service cus- tomization requirements.
Many complex manufacturers are looking to cloud computing to selec- tively apply new technologies to the challenge of being more customer-cen- tric. Hybrid-based cloud strategies that combine on-premise legacy systems and cloud-based applications that scale cus- tomer needs more effectively are work- ing for many manufacturers today. My recent blog post on Forbes.com, Five Catalysts Accelerating Cloud ERP Growth in 2015, provides insights from a recent Price Waterhouse Coopers study that shows how pervasive hybrid cloud ERP strategies have become.
Cloud Computing Ideal for Measuring, Improving Bidding and Estimating
Reinvigorating IT-manufacturing systems by selectively using cloud com- puting is working, especially in the areas of bidding, estimating and quot- ing. Of the many aspects of any ERP
54 MetalForming/April 2015
www.metalformingmagazine.com