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High-Tech Manufacturing

Current Trends

The market for high-tech communication, media, entertainment, home, and professional products is constantly growing — fueled by new technological achievements, by the convergence of telecom and IT, by more sophisticated users, and by the pull of emerging markets.

New versions and models with new and improved customer experience hit the market with alarming frequency, driving home the message that lead time to market is crucial for market share. Technological and functional complexity swiftly increase, while the demand patterns of the end consumers are unpredictably dynamic. High tech products have become “perishable goods” that put enormous strain on the R&D, sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, and aftermarket processes.

The dexterity, lead times, and efficiency of the inbound/outbound and after sales value networks along with how innovative your R&D abilities are will determine your competitiveness, profitability, and market shares.

The restructuring of the high-tech industry to meet these demands has forced high-tech manufacturers to focus on their core competencies and to outsource a large portion of the necessary value-added to partners. These partners must have the ability to consolidate generic demands and to create sufficient R&D and component-manufacturing capabilities to increase cost/benefits repeatedly during the year. Distribution structures are changing drastically as e-commerce in a boundless world requires physical distribution capabilities, which through the logistic industry’s huge investments and consolidations can offer overnight deliveries to most geographical areas in the developed countries.

The greatest challenge is to manage the increased complexity in the business logic and to leverage this complexity to the advantage of the company.

Cloud Processes for the value network enable management to take control of the complex end-to-end business processes and automate the basic interaction between the participants in the process. At the same time, they shorten the lead times in value-added activities and the lead time when changing business rules and participants in the value network. If the lead time of change in the value network is longer than the change of business prerequisites, then the competitiveness of the business deteriorates.


Business Improvements

Reduced Operating Cost

eBuilder's Cloud Processes automate more than 50% of the manual administration in handling business transactions for procurement, travel, inbound/outbound order fulfillment, after sales/customer care, and financial transactions. eBuilder makes a reality of “more for less."


Reduced Costs for Sourcing

eBuilder’s Cloud Processes enable full transparency in the procurement-ordering-delivery-financial transactions flow, thus enabling you to consolidate purchasing and enforce the correct workflow and logistical consolidation to optimize the cost and quality of sourcing. In most cases, a 3-15% reduction of costs is achieved.

Improved Customer Satisfaction/Retention

Our Cloud Processes promote the implementation of timely deliveries, as well as managed and optimized repair and return processes. This often results in a reduction of warranty costs by 5-10%. A reduction in consumer turnaround times by 10-50% is a major factor in achieving increased customer satisfaction, leading to greater loyalty to the supplier’s brand.

Enhanced Corporate Dexterity

The ability to handle dynamic complexity will have a vital impact on your competitiveness, profitability, ability to create an eco friendly and sustainable operation, and on shareholder value. This is an even greater challenge when most organizations are increasingly dependent on external collaborating parties (the value network) to deliver end-user satisfaction. This growing interdependence is a function of increased competition, entering into new markets, and leveraging cost effective production. In these matters, the high-tech industry is extremely exposed.

Cloud Processes link and control the value-added activities in the value network and link them to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes. The business rules and terms and conditions that govern the value-added activities are managed centrally by operational, tactical, and strategic functions to optimize your performance and to adapt to changes. The business improvements actualized by adopting Cloud Processes for the value network are dramatic; for instance, you can achieve ROI after less than six months.

Lean Change Management

The requirements for running a business are increasingly dynamic in our rapidly and unpredictably changing environment. And your business’s ability to react to change has a vital impact on its overall performance. With centrally managed Cloud Processes, business rules, and master data, the business logic and terms and conditions between the participants in the value network can be altered and deployed globally within days.

A quarterly improvement service is built into every Community Edition of the Cloud Processes. The releases in this service contain new functionality, enhancements, and maintenance. These improvements are driven by the product roadmaps for each Cloud Process. They are based on factual, real-time information relevant for operational, tactical, and strategic decisions presented by the Cloud Process Service for relevant target groups.

Our Cloud Processes enable managers of high tech companies to optimize the business and to rapidly change participants in the value network to effectively maximize the efficiency of the business. This is business dexterity, delivered.

Lower the Amount of Capital Tied Up in Assets

Leveraging the shortened lead times enabled by end-to-end connectivity, you can reengineer the business process and implement “on-demand” sourcing, reducing the number of consolidation points for physical goods, thus reducing the amount of capital you have tied up in assets. Strategies such as “vendor managed inventory” and outsourcing of order fulfillment are methods used to leverage Cloud Process capabilities.

The increased transparency and micro control gained with the Cloud Processes enable you to reduce both inbound and outbound assets in the value network. Spare parts can be optimized for the aftermarket processes related to product life cycles and end of product life. New strategies can be developed when the lead times are lowered to a level where the delivery time allows for “production on demand.” This moves competitiveness and profitability to a new level. And it clears the way for sustainability and the minimum utilization of natural resources while satisfying the needs of the individual consumer.

Boost your Competitive Advantage

The time to market is a crucial parameter in the high-tech manufacturing industry. In this hyperdynamic market, “the winner takes it all,” and the "best-in-class" product will have a dominant market share during the product life cycle. Because the R&D costs are huge and the product life cycle is constantly getting shorter, the volume sold determines the profitability. While specialization drives up the number of collaborators in the value network, the portion of the lead time in the value network is also increasing, and it is decisive.

Cloud Processes for the value network give you increased transparency and reduced lead times both in the inbound/outbound business processes and for the aftermarket and customer care processes.

A high-tech manufacturer using end-to-end Cloud Processes for the value network will have a comparative advantage in shorter lead time to market and a higher service level for the end consumer, again leading to higher profitability and customer retention.

Better information for decision making

eBuilder Cloud Process dashboards provide the operational, tactical, and strategic business information that enables digital management of your value network. Among other things, this gives the respective areas of responsibility the base on which to make the well-grounded decisions needed to monitor the agreed upon key performance indicators and service level agreements, key factors in creating and maintaining a competitive business. The need for relevant up-to-date information for decision making is met by deploying the Cloud Processes, which connect your value networks. They automatically monitor business events (business activity monitoring) in the entire value network and present relevant data on operational, tactical, and strategic levels together with business intelligence functionality that combines real- time business events into clearly presented statistics for improved business decision making.

This takes management to a new level by focusing on deviations from contracted KPIs and on improvements rather than managing and monitoring operational transaction issues that have little or no value for the end customer. We call this digital management.

High-tech companies are dependent on relevant information for decision making and follow-up of decisions. The information quality and immediacy must be superior. The ease with which you can change focus of your analysis and drill down is indispensible. These capabilities are standard in all Community Editions.

Shorter Lead Times in Operational Processes

eBuilder Cloud Processes enable online connectivity end-to-end, access to real-time operational, tactical, and strategic information; and they provide best practice business rules. Automation of business processes frees resources from repetitive administrative tasks so they can be used to handle deviations and improvements. This leads to shorter lead times across the end-to-end flow. Reductions are often in the range of 10-90%.

These reductions are remarkable, and they are a result of capabilities in the Cloud Process that enable the end-to-end, automatic Business Activity Monitoring and ensure that the information is of sufficient quality and that its flow never stops in the end-to-end business process. This enables faster, but always monitored, movement of physical assets.


IT Improvements

Reduce Costs for IT Operations

Most IT organizations have invested heavily in building an enterprise-wide IT infrastructure and ERP functionality. The focus has been on technical implementation, carried out by the business’s own IT organization or outsourced to IT consultants.

The historical trend has been to try to reuse more and more of existing investments and resources and to limit the company’s own investment to what is unique within the company to create competitiveness. This can be seen in the evolution from mainframes to client servers, to the PC, to the browser; and from in-house developed code to standard applications. So far, most projects show a limited ability to leverage external assets and investments. This results in long lead times for implementation, unpredictably high costs, and a focus on cost reduction. In most cases, this results in the IT organization lagging behind in projects that add immediate business value and instead being forced to focus on reducing costs in managing the infrastructure.

Cloud Processes for the value network give the IT organization an opportunity to implement a strategy for seamlessly integrating all external business parties (the value network), a strategy that complements the existing ERP and IT infrastructure investment while extending the enterprise-wide business processes into the value network. In the short term, this lowers IT costs and enhances the value of existing investments because Cloud Processes generate a clear and visible business value within a short period of time.

The Cloud Process implementation is completely different from traditional implementation. For a Community Edition Cloud Process, the implementation process consists of two main activities: Connect to Cloud and operation. The Connect to Cloud project consists of three parts: configuration of the customer-unique business rules, integration of the relevant internal systems, and the addition of unique business partners that are not already connected in eBuilder’s existing Business Process Network. This usually takes less than 15 weeks. Then the operation of the best practice Cloud Process starts. Payment for the operation is done on a transactional basis. ROI has been achieved in less than six months for the majority of the projects eBuilder has implemented.

The key to this favorable ROI is the degree of reuse. eBuilder Cloud Processes for the value network reuse all the 10 main resources of the Cloud Process implemented in our Accelerator SOA technology environment. They also reuse the seamless integration of the 10 different areas and the supervision and control services that ensure availability, quality in the information content (information entropy), and technical functionality. Because many customers share the cost of developing and maintaining this generic platform, the cost to the individual user is dramatically lower than the cost of implementing such a platform on an individual basis.

eBuilder’s Cloud paradigm enables a whole new way of using IT, where IT becomes the business, and computers execute the basic administration tasks that previously were based on human interaction. It also enables the IT organization to leverage joint infrastructure to address the challenges associated with creating efficiency in the value network and to participate in business development.