IDC MANUFACTURING INSIGHTS REPORT TALKS ABOUT 3RD PLATFORM ADOPTION

International Data Corporation (IDC) India recently released a research report that explains 10 specific scenarios that businesses can look at for impactful adoption of the 3^rd Platform – Mobility, Cloud, Big Data/Analytics, Social Business and related technologies, along with case studies.

If planned and implemented appropriately, 3^rd Platform along with other “Innovation Accelerators” such as IoT can help manufacturing companies perform better in two broad buckets – i) internally by enabling faster decision making, collaboration and productivity, ii) externally by introducing new customer facing business models and revenue streams and for overall product strategy by providing a closed loop for product performance from the field.

For companies looking at aggressive growth organically or inorganically, 3rd platform can provide aflexible IT infrastructure that can be deployed faster. IT is the backbone of businesses today and cannot be overlooked in a growing environment.

For commoditized products such as cement and paint where not much product differentiation is possible, 3rd Platform along with CRM can provide better customer experience and insights for the sales and marketing teams in a timely fashion until the last mile. Many more stock keeping units or SKUs can be offered as product combinations based on customer needs and handled efficiently.

Automobile, construction and agriculture equipment type of companies are leveraging the Internet-of-things or IoT to come up with foolproof and disruptive business models – product-as-a-service where customers need not buy the equipment but pay only for specific hours of usage. Revenue streams from aftermarket services and sale of spare parts can be made much more reliable and predictable. Product design teams can get valuable information on how the products are performing under specific situations and compare the planned performance against actual for improving future versions.

Customer feedback is usually unstructured in nature. It is vital to get timely voice of the customer and 3rd platform can again help by leveraging hand held devices. Quick decision making and action to correct a product or a process before it goes out of hand can be avoided by using analytics to leverage the data feed from customers and create proactive alerts. B2C companies such as telecom have used analytics to predict customer churn and reduce it before they lose any.

Regulatory requirements for Environment, Health and Safety and product traceability is another scenario where 3rd platform adoption can help businesses.Internal collaboration is becoming key today in organizations not just for productivity but to foster innovation and leverage the internal tacit knowledge available and convert it into tangible opportunities.

Enterprises will continue to face situationsduring their day-to-day operations in which technology decisions need to be taken with buy-in from multiple stakeholders. Business benefitsneed to be taken into account considering both the low-hanging fruits and, more importantly, the longtermimplications in terms of maintainability and total cost of ownership (TCO) throughout the lifetime ofthe application.