Profitable sustainability

Delivering Tailor-Made Solutions at Scale and as a Service

Industry overview

The world faces significant challenges across social, economic, and environmental realms. To foster a sustainable future, it's crucial for both individuals and companies to contribute. Industrial manufacturers play a pivotal role. They're responsible for creating the advanced, interconnected equipment that supports sustainable energy production, waste management for a circular economy, and the development of infrastructure essential for habitable cities. Yet, they must also navigate the evolving landscape of industrial manufacturing, driven by several key factors:

  • Customer-driven change: Today's consumers demand smart, tailored solutions at competitive prices, often preferring pay-as-you-go or usage-based pricing models. Capturing and acting on customer insights to enable mass customization is vital.

  • Digital Transformation: Adapting to the digital era is critical to meet rising customer demands, which involves overcoming challenges related to organizational structure, technical infrastructure, and securing skilled personnel to ensure cybersecurity.

  • Market Dynamics: The emergence of new competitors and business models requires industrial manufacturers to reassess their strengths and learn to deliver value within increasingly complex industry networks.

  • Going global: Manufacturers must adeptly redistribute resources, production, and finances globally to leverage regulatory and locational advantages and respond swiftly to disruptions.

This simplified yet comprehensive approach highlights the imperative for industrial manufacturers to adapt and innovate, ensuring their contributions towards a sustainable and technologically advanced future.

Challenges

01

Customer Centricity

Success now demands placing the end customer's perspective at the forefront of all decisions, influencing both product development and service offerings beyond just the sales department.

02

Personalization at scale

The challenge is to offer personalized solutions to every customer, similar to engineer-to-order environments, but on a mass scale. This involves capturing specific customer needs and enabling mass customization.

03

Digital Smart Products and Solutions

Standing out requires integrating digital capabilities and value-added services with physical products, such as self-monitoring features and connectivity with business systems, to offer unique products.

04

Digital Supply Networks and Smart Factor

The innovation lies in intelligently linking production and logistics with business operations, adapting to changes like demand shifts or order modifications in real-time.

04

Servitization and Outcome-Based Business Models

To combat product commoditization, the shift towards offering complete solutions and outcomes-based services is key, focusing on generating revenue through services for higher margins and closer customer relationships.

The Vision

1.
Customer Centricity

As the world evolves, so do customer expectations, necessitating a transformation in how companies perceive and manage customer experiences. To cultivate enduring customer relationships, businesses must embrace a shared risk model, emphasizing sustained value. This approach requires a comprehensive understanding of the customer, including their business operations and the practical application of products in their day-to-day activities. Given the challenge of commoditization, it's critical for industrial manufacturers to emphasize exceptional customer experiences and relationships as a key point of distinction.

2.
Personalization at scale

Traditionally, creating bespoke solutions for individual customers was standard in engineer-to-order settings. Today, the essential factor is efficiently capturing customer demands to facilitate mass customization, ensuring every customer gets precisely what they desire. The challenge lies in handling the unique details of each order across the entire value chain in a uniform manner, with costs comparable to those of standard orders.

3.
Digital Smart Products and Solutions

Modern smart products and solutions are increasingly reliant on a complex mix of electronics and software, which are becoming as crucial as their mechanical components. The significance of software is on the rise, enhancing and expanding the core capabilities of products while also facilitating new business models.

4.
Digital Supply Networks and Smart Factor

Supply chains and manufacturing networks within industrial companies are evolving to be fully modular and adaptable. This evolution enables the flawless implementation of diverse manufacturing strategies and enhances supply chain visibility, thereby boosting overall supply chain efficiency.

5.
Servitization and Outcome-Based Business Models

In the evolving landscape of industrial manufacturing, companies are increasingly offering comprehensive solutions that include machinery, software, services, parts, and consumables. This approach not only opens up new business avenues but also establishes a more reliable source of revenue. Additionally, transitioning towards models that charge based on outcomes or services is becoming more appealing to customers. It offers them the flexibility to convert capital expenditures into operational costs, share business risks, or experiment with new technologies at a lower risk.

The Journey

Today

Enable multichannel customer journeys and simplify customer interactions.

Future

Provide E2E customer experience management for meaningful interactions.

Customer Centricity

To create meaningful interactions, it's essential to manage the entire customer experience and integrate customer data seamlessly across the value chain. This approach not only simplifies the process of selling solutions and equipment but also shifts the focus towards delivering outcomes that are both effortless and convenient for the customer. Achieving a single, comprehensive view of the customer's operational and experience data enables businesses to offer tailored solutions and enhance customer satisfaction. By harnessing machine learning along with usage data from Internet-connected equipment and services, companies can introduce personalised, value-added offerings that meet individual customer needs. The strategic use of customer data and insights across all business operations plays a crucial role in identifying and minimising friction points, thereby elevating the overall customer experience. Furthermore, leveraging insights from customer usage data in the design of customer-centric equipment and services gives businesses a distinct competitive advantage, allowing them to more accurately meet and exceed customer expectations.

Today

Sell standard product with predefined variants for customers to configure to order

Future

Sell solutions comprising physical products, services, and subscriptions.

Personalization at scale

Selling solutions that include physical products, services, and subscriptions is becoming increasingly sophisticated, especially when it involves supporting project-based manufacturing for specific predefined variants within certain limits. By leveraging data-driven models, companies can recommend variants that add a layer of personalization to customer orders, all while utilizing a modular manufacturing approach. This strategy involves a seamless integration of product and process information, ensuring a supplier- and customer-integrated process that spans from product design through to the supply chain, manufacturing, sales, and aftermarket services. The capability for predictive material requirements planning is also essential, enabling real-time simulation of potential requirements, production, and capacity adjustments to enhance overall delivery performance. Furthermore, the execution of project-based orders is tightly interlinked with configure-to-order and engineer-to-order processing, accommodating the need for "additional limited engineering." This holistic approach not only streamlines operations but also allows for a high degree of customization and responsiveness to customer needs, setting a new standard for efficiency and customer satisfaction in the industry.

Today

Provide digitally connected products for individual use cases

Future

Augment physical products with digital solutions and services

Digital Smart Products and Solutions

Enhancing physical products with digital solutions and services involves creating a comprehensive digital representation that supports all use cases, thereby unlocking additional value-added services. This enhancement is realized through the creation of a single digital twin, which serves as both the digital representation and virtual counterpart of a physical object. By establishing a 360-degree view of products and solutions, companies can accelerate end-to-end scenarios, ensuring faster and more efficient operations. The approach also includes predicting, monitoring, and helping guarantee service levels, alongside scaling and implementing promising scenarios such as closed-loop engineering. A comprehensive digital thread is essential for synchronizing the information flow, feeding the twin, and connecting multiple twins with each other. This setup facilitates a continuous feedback and improvement loop, allowing for product enhancements based on actual usage and product behavior at the individual customer level. Such a strategy not only augments the product offering but also significantly improves the service delivery and customer experience, enabling businesses to stay ahead in the digital transformation journey.

Today

Support lean supply chains with optimized factories set uo for throughput

Future

Support resilient demand-driven supply networks and modular production

Digital Supply Networks and Smart Factor

Fostering resilient demand-driven supply networks and embracing modular production involves a strategic approach to supply chain management and manufacturing. This approach starts with predictive long-term supply network planning and simulation to anticipate future needs and challenges. It includes demand-driven material replenishment planning and prioritizing customer orders based on allocation, ensuring that the most critical needs are met first. By detecting, analyzing, and planning for supply network bottlenecks, companies can mitigate disruptions before they impact operations. Implementing a one-piece flow throughout the supply chain enhances efficiency and reduces waste. Predictive maintenance strategies prevent downtime and extend the life of equipment, while adaptive and modular production allows for flexibility in manufacturing processes to quickly respond to changing demands. The integration of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality interfaces for factory workers enhances interaction with machinery and processes, making complex tasks more manageable. Leveraging Industry 4.0 strategies enables autonomous action and self-optimized manufacturing, where systems can adjust and improve without human intervention. Automatic onboarding of machines and equipment streamlines setup and integration, further increasing efficiency. This holistic approach to supply chain and production management not only improves operational resilience but also positions companies to thrive in a rapidly changing market landscape.

85%

Of customer interactions will be automated by 2025

-20%

Reduction in customer attrition through reducing friction for customer experiences

+15%

Revenue lift due to smart personalization

How we can help

Discovery and analysis

Thorough discovery and analysis phase to understand your specific business needs and challenges. Utilize technology as the base for application integration, extension, and access to a robust ecosystem, including AI solutions.

01
Application Integration

Leverage industry-leading business applications across both front-end and back-end systems.

02
Comprehensive Support

Combine all elements to support customer-specific, end-to-end industry processes essential for digital transformation and operating as an intelligent and sustainable enterprise.

03

Our
use-cases

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Transportation and Logistics

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Manufacturing

Boosting Operational Efficiency with SAP Integration in the Metal Industry

Optimizing Product Configuration and Sales Processes