Initial situation
Companies generally complain that it takes too long to create customised quotations in sales and that statements concerning prices are not precise enough.
Printed product catalogues from the marketing department are usually outdated as soon as they are printed.
The VDMA has established that the lead time for orders in engineering departments has increased by 35% compared to 2007 (source: VDMA figures on development and engineering 2012).
Internal and external influences give rise to an enormous product diversity that departments are no longer able to keep track of and manage.
At the same time, batch sizes continue to shrink (source: VDMA figures on production and assembly 2013). The average batch size is currently 12.6.
As a general principle, a high level of diversity is a good thing, since it allows a company to set itself apart from other market participants and to offer its customers individual solutions at higher prices. The challenge, however, lies in achieving small production batches, down to a batch size of 1 economically.
speedmaxx manages diversity and speeds up business processes
Our product speedmaxx is essentially concerned with managing the diversity of your products and dramatically speeding up your order acquisition and order fulfilment processes.
Your marketing department can advertise variants better on the WEB, your sales department can offer and sell variants faster and your engineering department can design variants more rapidly.
And only those variants are permitted that you actually intended to have. An attempt is always made to use an existing variant to meet a customer’s needs.
What production methods are suitable?
Take a look at the diagram below. The challenges grow larger from left to right.
The influence of customers on your product increases continuously with the degree of customisation. In the worst case, you will end up making a lot of things new because the situation is simply unpredictable. Or, put simply, your company refuses to do things more simply, because engineering is so creative and perhaps because the conditions do not exist to determine whether a particular variant has already been produced.
The goal must be to integrate customers very closely into the business processes, but always with guide rails. If it is possible to offer a fast alternative that does not meet the requirements 100% but which costs significantly less and is available sooner, customers will choose the cheaper variant. This is of course not always the case.
There is a recommended trend away from ETO (engineer to order) and to move to the left towards MTO (make to order) and ATO (assemble to order). Our technology will help you do this.
We ultimately enable you to take advantage of your market’s willingness to pay a higher price for customised products and at the same time to generate the required sales and production data at the click of a button, in order to then produce a customised product in a small production batch very economically.
>> Learn what other companies have already accomplished here