LNS Research: How Legacy Systems Are Holding Manufacturers Back
By Ally Kutz, contributing writer
LNS Research outlined what 2015 may look like for many companies, including connection to customers, operational challenges, business conditions, and how some manufacturers will achieve their operational goals.
According to LNS Resarch’s Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) survey, 61 percent of manufacturers cited ensuring consistent product quality as their top priority, followed by meeting customer demands at 55 percent.
The survey also found that the top two operational challenges in meeting company goals were lack of collaboration across different departments, affecting 48 percent of those surveyed, and contrasting systems and data sources, affecting almost 40 percent surveyed; both are greatly related to technology and process proficiencies.
Business conditions are also changing, with 71 percent surveyed seeing an increase in the number of products, SKUs, or variants in their businesses with 66 percent seeing an increase in instability of customer demand. Customer demand for a greater number of products in a shorter amount of time is growing each year, placing strain on legacy systems.
Manufacturers are looking to digital thread technologies. This digital thread enables a single, bi-directional flow of digitized information across the value chain, and includes important strands such as cloud, Big Data, and the Internet of Things (IoT). These technologies assist businesses by enabling streamlined collaboration of product designs into manufacturing operations and extracting additional information, among other improvements.
For manufacturers, it is important to consider both the growing wants and desires of customers and the investments competitors are making when deciding between legacy systems and new digital thread technologies, particularly as technologies improve and costs decrease.
To read more about legacy systems in the coming year, click here.