The business of manufacturing is driving toward providing customers complete service over the entire life cycle of products.
As production systems become more flexible and more highly automated, differentiation and value creation will depend increasingly upon services. Manufacturers will aim to solve their customers’ problems, and become important elements in their customers’ success. They will do so by offering a complete service package – including research and development, design and engineering, testing and quality assurance, financing, maintenance, delivery logistics, after-sales service, upgrades, and ultimately product disposal. No company will be able to provide all of the services needed by customers. However, service providers will be integrated with companies that make things in international value networks, supply chains, and virtual enterprises.
Manufacturers, their customers, and their suppliers together form value chains that compete against other value chains for sales to final consumers.
Today, manufacturing depends on the efficient management of supply chains and business networks. However, the extended businesses of the future will be virtual enterprises in which business units around the world will continuously reconfigure their operations and supply chain relationships, forming and reforming networks on a project-by-project basis. They will rely on networked information systems and virtual engineering to ensure concurrent design, production, marketing, service, and sales support. They will operate as if their member firms were all units of a single continuously reconfigurable enterprise, regardless of their geographic location. And, when successful, they will all be aligned to provide solutions for the ultimate customer.
Manufacturing will be an even more knowledge-intensive business in the future.
Its focus on delivering full service solutions to customers will require a highly educated, highly flexible, and highly skilled workforce in order to create, produce, manage, and deliver the innovative and differentiated products, processes, and services that future customers will demand.
Manufacturers’ value chains will really be customers’ knowledge supply chains. The concept says a lot about how knowledge will be commercialized, how innovation will have to be managed, as well as about the importance of education, skills, and experience at every stage of the process.