With the help of digital manufacturing, even mid-market manufacturers have been able to increase their participation in the global marketplace. Initially, the mid-market manufacturers had been slow to adopt PLM, primarily because of a belief that PLM is a complex implementation, affordable only to larger enterprises. This resulted in poor control over the product information and processes critical to meeting the previously mentioned business issues. Further, business suffered for those who failed to act because of slow customer response, inability to meet increased supplier qualification requirements, severe costs of globalization, and the high pace of product change in modern-day markets. As SMEs seized the opportunity to improve their product innovation, product development, and engineering processes, they received tangible benefits at par with larger manufacturers. These included increased revenues by up to 19%, reduced product cost up to 17%, and decreased product development cost by about 16%. The Aberdeen Small to Medium-Size Manufacturers Benchmark report indicates that about one-third SMEs outsource, out of which 22% outsource at least some of their product design, with about 75% having a global product design strategy in place.

Mid-market manufacturers have been seen following the trends of the large manufacturers as they increase their investment in PLM.

PLM Needs
PLM application vendors have started responding to mid-market needs not only with functionality, but also by delivering PLM in a variety of ways to ease adoption by smaller manufacturers. Now, choosing the right PLM application is not seen as a one-size-fits-all decision. Manufacturers have many options to choose from and are able to assess their unique requirements. While supplier qualification still remains a hurdle for manufacturers, the bar continues to be higher. Manufacturers have a broad choice of vendors to choose from, to meet their PLM needs. These markets are broadly divided into two categories. The first would be the most established vendors with customers distributed across market sizes and the second would be several established and emerging vendors that have primarily, but not entirely, focused on the mid-market.

With PLM having proved that their solutions can offer significant benefits for small to medium-size manufacturers, an increased number of companies have recognized their value, and adopted the trend. PLM offerings designed for SMEs have helped lower the barriers for functional and technical adoption. Manufacturers are now themselves seeking out for PLM solutions and approaching their vendors. Those SMEs that were looking to adopt PLM have started considering the benefits of reduced technical barriers to implementation through hosted solutions or software as a service. SMEs are opting for options, which enable them to take action and seize opportunity provided by PLM to improve product innovation, product development, and engineering processes, thereby enabling them to improve corporate-level business performance.

Moving Ahead
Every organizations culture is as important as the technology that it uses, therefore, companies should have the ability to cross over from the traditional boundaries existing in their organizations and adopt new means and methods. It is, thus, seen that SMEs have begun to embrace digital manufacturing not only for the mere reason of survival, but also for competition. By the use of these extended enterprise solution, companies have been able to achieve substantial benefits throughout the enterprise. These direct benefits have helped reduce misunderstandings, motivated coordination during production, enabled more effective tooling and component delivery, and finally improved communication.

Suman Bose
The author is country director, India, PLM Sales, Dassault Systemes

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