The year 2017 is at its maturity stage and everyone is looking forward to the forthcoming New Year, 2018. With some speculations, apprehensions, and expectations, that may directly or indirectly impact the manufacturing sector, everyone is fishing for top predictions for 2018. Be it about fourth industrial revolution or digitalization or mobilization, all this is instrumental in defining the manufacturing scenario in the coming year.
Read ahead to know the top predictions that may bring some extraordinary changes in the manufacturing arena, especially for the process manufacturers, in the coming year.
1 Scaled customization– will be the latest trend that might attract most of the process manufacturers as they will be able to produce exactly what the customers’ want, when they want, & how much they want. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution will be helpful in attaining that accuracy with perfection. In 2018, the manufacturers will gain the much-needed digital flexibility for modern manufacturing, which may bring a bigger micro-economic shift.
2 Customer-driven designs- When digitalization becomes an integral part of customer interaction, most manufacturers will try to collaborate directly with customers to act more responsive to them and also gain new and improved product designs via cloud-based information exchange platform. With the help of virtual reality and product virtualization, a supreme level of customization will be possible, ultimately manufacturers might realize up to 25% improvement in product acceptance amongst their client base.
3 S/4 HANA is the future- The highly scalable in-memory platform will surely bring revolution in financial management and accounting. Apart from the new class of real-time analytics and applications, SAP S/4 HANA will cover the full range of financial tasks, including planning, analysis, accounting, compliance and risk management for a better performing manufacturing business.
4 Predictive & prescriptive analytics- Manufacturers are expected to make investments in the data mining platforms that will be leveraged to gain insights into a wide variety of business problems in logistics, people analytics, and material sourcing. The key emerging technologies like business analytics, big data analysis, and business intelligence will bring out ways to enhance your business’s performance and organizations will be able to take a significant leap in the analytics journey.
5 3D- visualization of product application- Emerging technologies of the new era like the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), conversational chatbots, and natural language translation will be instrumental in bringing a revolution to the customer experience. With the help of such technologies, 3D product visualization will turn into reality and customers will be able to experience the products of their choice even before the actual purchase.
The year 2018 will be the year of transformational manufacturing change. Manufacturing business of every size and shape can experience change rapidly by adopting new digital technologies, new competitors, new business ecosystems, and new ways of doing business. The winner of the race will be the ones who can speed up their adoption of digital capabilities in order to create substantial business value to the customers. Our predictions create a framework around IT and manufacturing operations targeted to bring forth exceptional customer related initiatives in the year ahead, and an ERP is at the core of it. No one understands the needs of process manufacturers better than we do, as we have the experience of serving the process manufacturing industries with our range of expert ERP solutions for past 30 years. For more information about our products, log on to www.batchmaster.co.in.
