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Manufacturers are spot on the average for hardware flexibility across the business sectors at 47%, according to analyst Butler Group’s recent benchmarking survey. However, they are well below the average on the software side – 20% against the mean 29% value. Does that matter? Well ultimately, yes it could – for two reasons. First, globalisation, commoditisation and technology are lowering the barriers to new entrants, so competing today is increasingly about improving your customer experience and opportunity awareness as well as cutting costs and improving agility in design and production. But typically when managers start wanting to adjust business processes, they find those are ‘hard wired’ in their systems – so making changes is going to cost a lot of money and take 12 months, by which time it’s too late.
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