Innovation is the fuel of growth, while innovators lead their respective markets by keeping up with or staying ahead of customer demands and delivering new and exciting experiences. These disruptors always seem to discover the best ideas that customers want, leading them into increased market share. While they also understand that innovation does not end with just the creation and delivery of a product and most of themdo not use traditional legacy systems.
Rather, to drive top-line growth and gain value, innovators unify data and processes—from idea capture development, manufacture, and service—on a one single platform for innovation. This increases the efficiency of innovation, ensuring that customers are always satisfied, and businesses thrive even during adverse market dynamics.
Smart Idea Generation
The speed with which an organization can generate ideas that customers value determines the growth of the company. But, with varied ideas , it's easy for the best ideas to go unnoticed.
Generally, top innovators directly involve their workforce and key suppliers in the innovation process to foster a culture of creativity by providing simple-to-use cloud applications that are highly visual, mobile, and collaborative—the way tech-savvy innovators prefer to work. They establish best practices to help incubate their ideas and align innovation with their strategic goals by making innovation more structured and collaborative.
Today's innovators don't rely solely on crowdsourced ideas. They use analytics and closely link feedback from their customers, products, and factories to help promote winning ideas and turn them into successful development projects.
Organize
The first step is to accumulate the data; after that, it is critical to separate and organize it and make an effective use of it. Organizations must completely analyse data data to adapt to market demand. Given the current disruptions, this is especially true for supply chain system stakeholders. Development and supply chain planning organizations have traditionally relied on disparate systems and processes. This means that when development was ready to release a new product to planners, they simply “threw it over the wall” to what quickly became an exercise in assimilating and synchronizing data. When innovation is managed in this manner, it is difficult to achieve the end-to-end visibility required to drive faster and more frequent innovation. Hence, notable innovators use a unified platform for continuous innovation. They have a systematic way to qualify suppliers and keep their trusted sources of supply flowing to support new product and service aspirations when combined with flexible sourcing capabilities.
Source
What is the most efficient way for businesses to ensure that value creation can occur anywhere in their extended ecosystem? By ensuring that research and development is a collaborative process with their supply partners. However, increased customer demand for innovative products, as well as the need to source larger portions of materials from suppliers all over the world, can present numerous challenges. Due to these complexities, companies are increasingly involving their suppliers throughout the product lifecycle. Top manufacturers understand that strategic supplier collaboration can help them unlock new opportunities, so they're implementing a single end-to-end solution to standardize how they collaborate, source, qualify, and integrate suppliers into the process. Companies must use their SCM software to realign their production and distribution of scarce products to the most profitable, highest-priority customers and channels.
Modern product innovation necessitates the use of a single platform that enables development and engineering teams at both the manufacturer and the supplier to easily collaborate on new product designs. Procurement teams can source more effectively and access the accurate and real-time information they need to reuse existing items Unified platforms allow businesses to properly qualify suppliers and assess their ability to deliver against requirements such as sustainability, production capacity, and corporate codes of conduct, ensuring that design partners can also be effective suppliers as the transition is made from design to production. Entire supply chains are starting to leverage blockchain digital ledger technology to improve the efficiency and transparency of their operations.
Personalised production
In today's competitive marketplace, producing high-quality products must be done faster, better, and shoulw be more consumer centric. Manufacturers must improve their agility, improve decision-making, and achieve more even with limited resources. While, visibility and collaboration throughout the innovation cycle and supply chain network are critical to success. To maximize efficiency, manufacturers must leverage capabilities such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and robotics to connect customer, product, and factory feedback across the value chain. Now’s the time to fully utilize your supply chain planning solutions to simulate likely scenarios and generate forecasts that better predict ever-changing global demand patterns.
Thus, personalization is the key to increasing customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Manufacturing organizations that use a single platform for innovation can better understand what their customers want and then design, produce, and deliver products to markets more quickly.
Customer service: Priortise feedback and make necessary changes where required
In current times, almost anything can be offered as a service, from streaming music to heavy machinery to software. What used to be a "sell it and forget it" interaction with your customers is now the beginning of a long-term relationship. Customers benefit from these new business models because they can now rent, subscribe, and pay on a per-use basis. And if they don't like the service, they can easily switch. For example, as a service provider, companies must keep their services and equipment running smoothly, and your software is always updated and secured. Thus, successful innovators design their services around their customers to thrive and maximize their return on investment.
As customer buying behaviors shift—particularly from physical to online channels—companies will need to identify and react to those shifts, and plan for the “ripple effects” across their plants, data centers, and extended supply chains. Organizations that move in this direction will emerge as innovators and thrive in the coming years.