Vertical Industry Communications: Manufacturing OutlookVertical Industry Communications: Manufacturing Outlook

In this, the third in our series on vertical industry communications, we analyze communications for manufacturing. For earlier articles in the series, see:

Manufacturing Highlights
Manufacturing is a core industry with broad impact for most economies. The manufacturing industry has a diverse array of subsectors, including aerospace, automotive, food, beverage, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, electronics, clothing, furniture, and a wide range of consumer goods.

Manufacturing is very competitive, driven by global production and transportation options and with Internet-based product and price comparisons. This competitiveness drives manufacturers to seek continuous improvement in their operational models. Now, with breakthroughs in unified communications technologies, manufacturers can realize bottom-line benefits by optimizing the communications steps in their value chains.

Manufacturing is a process-oriented industry, since a primary goal is to produce consistent quality products, usually at high scale and low costs. Methods such as Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma management seek to maximize production efficiency by removing defects, errors, waste, and rework from the manufacturing process. Now, communications activities can be subjected to the same optimizing methodologies.

Manufacturing Value Chain
The manufacturing value chain elements are essentially as described by Harvard professor Michael Porter in his famous 1985 book, "The Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance." These steps are to:

The communications requirements of the first six value chain elements group into three categories, each of which uses specific usage profiles (descriptions here). Importantly, the communications requirements for these usage profiles in manufacturing are no longer best served by a PBX, especially a PBX with one common feature set for all users. Let's look at the value chain elements.

Develop and Market
These two value chain elements are highly collaborative. In these profiles, inventive and creative group activities help shape the products and the promotional projects to match the needs of the selected market segments. This is true whether manufacturing locomotives, computers, clothing, or candy.

In these value chains, team members create hypotheses for products and marketing campaigns. They then critically evaluate these hypotheses, and collaborate with others to make the new products available to the market. These others may include production planners, distribution planners, sales and service planners, and outside contractors such as at advertising agencies.

Communications best practices in development and marketing are now based on process-specific software that includes the required communications capabilities. Two examples would be Atlassian Jira for (software) development teams and Workfront for marketing teams. Both applications include tools for team interaction, code/document creation and sharing, and communications via messaging and meetings. Outside parties, such as subcontractors or agencies, can be included in these workflows. These tools may not include voice calling to other extensions in the enterprise, but that's usually managed with an adjacent application such as the IM client (Microsoft Skype for Business and Cisco Jabber), workstream communications and collaboration (a "teams" app), or softphone applications such as IP PBX desktop and mobile clients. While some of these tools don't include voice calling to external parties, today's collaborative workers commonly use their smartphones for text and voice.

Participants in development and marketing value chain elements use the Collaboration Usage Profile.

Of course, we see the IP PBX on-premises and cloud vendors seeking to serve this value chain/usage profile group with team-oriented software such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex Teams, Unify Circuit, and similar offers. That may be possible in some manufacturing firms, but would require some care to customize the implementation to match the development and marketing workflows.

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Sales and Services
These two value chain elements are very transactional. While vendors make an argument that sales personnel must collaborate to produce a sale and that service personnel must collaborate to resolve an issue or ticket, this is actually transaction-based communications. Both sales and services personnel are working within well-defined parameters of the customer's identityandentitlements, and the manufacturer's specific products, prices,and service offerings.

For sales, the transaction is triggered by a customer request or a lead generation. This is almost always logged in a customer relationship management (CRM) application such as Salesforce.comor Microsoft Dynamics, and essentially all continuing communication is managed through that CRM application on the user's computer and mobile device. These CRM applications include the tools for sharing, messaging and, usually, meeting that sales personnel need to consult with back-office support and management. "Outside" or field sales will also use the computer or mobile device for text and voice communicationswith customers or prospects. "Inside" sales teamswill usually be part of a contact center, such that incoming customer requests reach the best possible team member and are always served quickly, with reference to the CRM transactions.

For services, the transaction is triggered by a service request generated by an automated alarm, a Web page request,an email,or a phone call. From that point, the service process and the related communication proceeds within a service ticket management system such as Remedy or ServiceNow. Increasingly, these applications include theapplicablesharing, messaging,and meeting tools, available on both computers and mobile devices. In some cases, the help desk team will be part of a contact center, to optimize customer service as well as resource management. Fieldservice personnel will use their mobile devices for all communications, from within their service application.

Thus, sales and service value chain personnel will us either the Field Usage Profile, which really doesn't need an IP PBX license, or the Contact Center Usage Profile. In some cases, members of the sales and service teams may be represented by the Information Processing Usage Profile.

The clear message hereis that the core communications application for the sales and services value chain elements will be the CRM or services applications. In some cases, we see the IP PBX vendors offering an integration plug-in for the leading CRM and services applications. In a few cases, the IP PBX vendor seeks to displace the CRM or services application with some form of collaboration tool, but seldom has that approach produced a best-in-class capability compared to the built-for-purpose apps.

Produce and Deliver
This final pair of value chain elements are the most transactional of all. Almost all communications in production and distribution are managed in today's leading manufacturing firms by enterprise resource planning (ERP) technologies from vendors such as SAP, Oracle, IBM, and dozens of other core or ancillary built-for-purpose software application providers. These transaction-centric communications within very defined processes are managed by automatic or manual posting of information to the ERP application for action, status review, analysis, and/or approval by others in the processes. Exceptions are most likely to be managed via email, instant messaging, texting, and meetings.

Thus, there is minimal IP PBX-type communications in the production and distribution value chain. Some manufacturing firms continue to provide IP PBX telephony for production and distribution team members, but increasingly the best practice is to communicate via the ERP applications, via email and IM/SMS texting with click-to-call functionality, and via both ad hoc and planned meetings.

The administrative portion of the deliver value chain element will have other transactional activities and software applications for billing, collections, etc. However, this will still be based on the ERP software in which most communications can occur and from which communications to and from customers will be managed and logged.

The Production and Information Processing Usage Profiles define the requirements for these workflows.

Enterprise Support
Most enterprise support value chain communications is provided by the Foundational Services and Information Processing usage profiles. Functional management and executive management, along with administrative support, are communications-intensive jobs, due to oversight and coordination roles. This remains an area for which advanced IP PBX features are still required, as described in the Management and Administration usage profiles.

Summary
Communications in the manufacturing vertical market segment has become almost entirely embedded in the software applications used to maintain and advance the competitiveness of manufacturing industry enterprises. Communications architects and managers in manufacturing will likely produce the best communications services for their organizations by focusing on:

This shift to application-enabled business processes and embedded communications is inexorable, as has been suggested by Gartner Magic Quadrant reports for UC in recent years. Best to go with this flow rather than to ignore it or, worse, spend effort swimming upstream.

BCStrategies is an industry resource for enterprises, vendors, system integrators, and anyone interested in the growing business communications arena. A supplier of objective information on business communications, BCStrategies is supported by an alliance of leading communication industry advisors, analysts, and consultants who have worked in the various segments of the dynamic business communications market.