Manufacturers are under the gun increasingly today to develop more customized products for customers. Also referred to as “mass customization,” creating products with specific functionality for special niches of customers is at odds with traditional mass production methods that have been in place for years. In order to respond, companies must adapt and change both their internal design processes as well as the way in which they manufacture products.
Siemens and Tata Consultancy Services, a leading IT services and consulting company, have joined forces to create a new joint software and services solution for automating complex Engineer-to-Order (ETO) processes. The solution will be called ETO2Win and it leverages TCS’s domain expertise and Siemens’ Rulestream software.
ETO2Win is designed to capture, manage and reuse corporate intellectual property to automate engineering processes for manufacturers. ETO2Win addresses business challenges faced by ETO manufacturers by streamlining business processes associated with custom-built products, improving proposal accuracy and win rates, and enhancing the predictability of costs, margins and on-time delivery.
“Siemens’ powerful ETO software technology, combined with TCS’ proven ETO process framework, provides our customers with an enterprise-level solution for accelerating sales and order engineering processes for custom products,” said Caroll Jarvis, vice president, Global Alliance Sales, Siemens PLM Software. “This innovative software and services approach has created a comprehensive solution that reduces implementation time and risk, ultimately yielding a faster return on our customers’ PLM investment and helping to improve the bottom-line.”
A large and growing number of manufacturing industry segments, including power generation, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), fluid flow technologies, heavy equipment, machinery, and the automotive and aerospace supply base employ ETO business processes.
The increasing demand for customized or customer-specific product configurations creates a common set of challenges for these companies. There is constant competitive pressure for ETO manufacturers to increase the number, accuracy and win rate of their bids, while reducing order engineering lead time and optimizing resource utilization in manufacturing.
Rulestream addresses the unique challenges faced by ETO manufacturers with a comprehensive solution spanning sales, engineering and manufacturing. By capturing engineering knowledge and using it to automate key business processes across the enterprise, ETO2Win, with Rulestream and TCS’ ETO process framework and best practices, streamlines the inquiry-to-quote and order-to-release processes for even the most complex products, enabling manufacturers to sell according to their engineering and manufacturing capabilities.
To find out more on the Siemens PLM Software and TCS alliance, click here.
