Industrial Manufacturing

The Challenge In Industrial Manufacturing

Xerox Business Value Case Study

When Xerox EMEA set out to cut costs and increase the resources available to support its legacy environment, it looked to IT partner EDS. EDS relied on onshore and offshore resources to help Xerox centralize support for 96 business-critical applications and transition to a new eSAP-based business application.

Steep energy and raw material costs. Global supply and demand imbalances. The need for higher-margin product and service bundles.

To compete effectively and retain your leadership status, you have to manage costs, protect margins, make your business more efficient and respond immediately to rapid change. How? By acquiring agile technology that supports your business strategy.

The Answer

Efficient product and process development and manufacturing are paramount if you are to free up your capital for investment in innovation and customer retention. You need an information technology (IT) partner with a global footprint, application, infrastructure and business process skills that can:

Enable lean manufacturing
Transform your plant
Simplify your enterprise support functions
Make your supply chain flexible

It's also vital that this IT partner supply a road map to:

Support your business
Rationalize applications
Consolidate technologies
Build interfaces
Refine processes
Realign assets where needed

Your IT partner should work harder than simply reducing and managing your IT costs. They must manage resource-hungry systems so your assets and people are free to concentrate on other tasks that will keep you competitive. EDS is just such a partner.

For example, a global steel manufacturer was struggling to manage an application that was critical to keeping production moving across 10 production stages in three plants. By implementing an integrated-management solution, EDS helped the company reduce its work in progress and raw materials inventories by up to 20 percent and reduce order-processing time by more than 80 percent.

Increase Your Margins Through Innovation

Your strategy may require bundling new or extended services with existing products. It may demand that production processes become more flexible so they can adopt emerging technologies. Or it may necessitate improving your Research & Development. EDS can help you drive innovation in your manufacturing and engineering departments by:

Designing and implementing integrated product lifecycle management
Managing manufacturing execution solutions
Creating intelligent products

Retain Customers and Grow Market Share

To maintain your existing customer base while attracting new customers requires more than just delivering the products and services your customers demand. You need to free up your sales force by eliminating burdensome processes so they can focus on what's important – selling. You also need to provide your sales force with access to critical data such as:

Order information
Stock status
Product and marketing information

EDS helps industrial clients overcome this challenge so you can:

Improve communications
Streamline your order cycle
Provide your reps with real-time inventory information

As a result, you're able to increase customer satisfaction because your salespeople are empowered to provide additional service and ideas.

Currently, we're helping industrial manufacturers around the world meet their objectives with a wide array of services that include:

The Results

We can help you streamline product development, improve product management systems and processes, reduce raw material inventories and increase your on-time delivery percentages and, ultimately, customer satisfaction.

You benefit by:

Reducing the product development cycle
Accelerating production volume
Cutting asset requirements

EDS Has The Expertise You Need To Continue Your Success

Tapping into our global experience and industry expertise, you can drive down costs and accelerate growth. We've done it for others in the industrial manufacturing sector, and we can do it for you.

More than 20 years of experience in the manufacturing industry
Support for more than 330 manufacturing clients, including 75 percent of the top 100 manufacturing companies
Support for nearly three-quarters of a million manufacturing desktops
Manage 250,000 applications
Manage 16,250 servers in 240 data centers around the world