A recent study released by Business Advantage Group, a B2B research and consultancy based in the U.K., identified some of the key CAD trends in 2014. The company surveyed 409 CAD users and decision makers with the goal of identifying key trends in the CAD sector, both now and over the next five years.
Despite a lot of media attention and making nearly every tech consultancy’s top tech trends list this year, big data apps were not viewed as important to the survey’s participants. Despited the touted benefits of mining big data, which include faster response times to market (45%), savings on cost (41%) and design time (32%), as well as design improvements (32%), according to the survey, only 3% of respondents are currently using data analytics applications and only a total of 4% will be predicted to do so within the next year.
Reasons why big data will be important
Despite the lackluster response of those CAD users and decision makers, big data will indeed play an increasingly important role in all types of business, including manufacturing. The amount of data in the world has exploded, and the ability to analyze these large data sets–so-called big data–will become a key basis of competition, spawning new levels of innovation and productivity growth.
According to a report by McKinsey & Co., big data can unlock significant value by making data transparent and usable at a much high frequency. Also, as organizations create and store more transactional digital data, they can collect more accurate and detailed performance data on things, such as product inventories to expose variability and boost performance.
Leading companies are using this big data to conduct experiments to make better management decisions and to do forecasting to adjust business levers in response to trends.
Let’s take a look at some of the way manufacturers will benefit from the ability to mine their big data.
1. Increase innovation and development of next-generation products. Manufacturers can capture data to implement product changes that prevent future problems or to provide customer-use inputs to feed into idea pipelines for the development of next-generation offerings.
2. Improve customer satisfaction. For example, manufacturers are using data obtained from embedded sensors to create innovative after-sales service offerings, such as proactive maintenance, which enables preventative measures to take place before failure even occurs or is noticed by customers.
3. Sharpen competitive advantage. Companies in all industries will leverage big data-driven strategies to innovate, compete, and capture value from up-to-real-time information. Analyzing data from sales and linking it to suppliers’ databases make it possible for companies to adjust prices in real time, to increase production of hot-selling items automatically or move inventory from one store to another.
4. Create more narrow segmentation of customers. With your entire customer database segmented into narrow groups of users, nimble product developers can more precisely tailor products to specific groups of consumers.
5. Reduce downtime. Products ranging from copiers to jet engines can now generate data streams that track their usage. Manufacturers can analyze the incoming data and, in some cases, automatically fix software glitches or schedule preemptive repairs before failures disrupt customers’ operations.
The bottom line for manufacturers is that big data can help drive productivity gains, both through improving operational efficiency and the quality of products. Efficiency gains will be seen across the value chain, from cutting down on unnecessary iterations in product development cycles to optimizing the assembly process. The real benefit, however will be increased product quality and designing products that better match their customers’ needs.
To learn more about big data, check out McKinsey & Company’s “Big Data: the Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition and Productivity.”
