Changing the Tire On a Moving Car
14 Sep 2007
Driving Growth Requires Improving Operations While Concurrently Keeping Pace With Customer Demand
Next Steps
- Read more about the EDS Product Life Cycle Management Solution
- Learn more about the Global Automaker Case Study
- See all of the EDS Service Offerings
The race to grow requires agility. Agility requires enterprise collaboration. With stakeholders on all sides of an organization influencing productivity, these competencies are becoming ever more disparate and ever more challenging.
Like changing the tire on a moving car, updating legacy systems and engaging the business ecosystem to share and leverage knowledge requires a sophisticated infrastructure and the ability to make broad-based changes to your organization without slowing the pace of your business.
Tuning Up Collaboration
For an enterprise to be agile and able to outmaneuver the competition, it must share knowledge amongst all stakeholders. The business ecosystem must be integrated in order to reduce redundancies, champion best practices, and drive productivity. Achieving integration enables a company to anticipate and respond to customer needs, enhance customer loyalty, and be agile in capitalizing on market opportunities – all key factors to growth.
Fueling a Competitive Edge
Success Story
Read the global automaker case study or visit www.areyoureadyfornow.com to see other EDS success stories.
EDS enables enterprises to grow through productive, innovative, and secure solutions. Recently, a leading automaker facing fierce competition, ever-increasing cost pressures, a complex regulatory environment, and fickle customer demand, turned to EDS to help find a competitive edge in the market place to drive growth. Success in this arena required a solution that would seamlessly link everyone from design and manufacturing teams to business partners and suppliers around the globe. The new ecosystem would connect disparate stakeholders, quicken the introduction of new models to the market at a lower cost, and ultimately better serve customers – all key factors in increasing sales and profits.
EDS delivered a competitive edge to the client with the deployment of an integrated product lifecycle management (PLM) solution. The improvements were integrated without slowing down business operations. The solution aligned with business processes, and integrated with existing applications, the automaker’s legacy systems, manufacturing, autocad applications and third-party vendors. This enabled true global connectivity and collaboration across the extended enterprise. Now a vital part of the company’s everyday operations, EDS provides continuous global management of the environment to ensure the system is firing on all cylinders.
Driving Growth
Thanks to efficiencies gained through PLM, the automaker is enjoying remarkable success in growth markets. In Asia Pacific, for example, the company was able to manufacture a vehicle that hit the sweet spot of market demand in terms of cost, design and fuel mileage. The client sold more than 170,000 of the models produced and delivered with the help of the PLM solution, quickly surpassing the one-time entrenched market leader in terms of sales. Moreover, the client was able to take another model from prototype to production in just two years – half the time required before the PLM integration implementation – a timeframe once considered impossible.
Changing the Tire and Maintaining Speed
As the scope of business becomes more expansive, remaining agile is more difficult. Complex ecosystems provide opportunities for growth, but simultaneously create a far more challenging environment for productive collaboration. Adapting outdated processes and systems while maintaining momentum will define the success of enterprises in the future. To win the race to grow, agility and productivity must be seamlessly integrated into existing business operations, ultimately empowering stakeholders and better serving customers.