"Organize to be more responsive to customer needs."
That theme, from The Greatest Innovation Since The Assembly Line, dramatizes how the integrated enterprise can pursue greater success with such collaborative tools as product lifecycle management.
Author Michael Hugos warns that in the high-change global economy, responsiveness now trumps efficiency. His prediction: "Soon, those companies that cannot make money from a hundred small adjustments and some occasional big wins will hardly be profitable at all." And that's the mildest penalty for pursuing efficiency at the expense of customer responsiveness. His worst-case business scenarios include the recent bankruptcy filings of auto parts companies despite winning awards for efficient manufacturing.
Hugos documents the continuing paradigm shift in the production world where the principles of agile manufacturing optimize enterprise objectives rather than goals at the departmental level.
To increase agility, Hugos advocates techniques like service-oriented architecture to build new IT systems from parts of older systems plus the use of business process management and enterprise application integration to collect and share data.
