By now not only have the large companies experienced the impact of digital revolution and manufacturing automation, but medium and small companies are also under great pressure, since the medium and small companies are part of the product supply chain. For example, automotive prototype manufacturers china, the automobile door manufacturing company, Company D, may serve as a supplier for the big three auto companies.It has provided various doors to these companies over the years. However, Company D may have another supplier, say Company S, which is making the door frames. In other words, Company S acts as a supplier’s supplier. When the market is very competitive, each company is trying its best to optimize its process and supply chains. One or more of the big three companies may be evaluating whether to buy doors from Company D or make the doors themselves. Therefore, Company D needs to make sure that their doors will be competitive in cost, quality, and delivery time. With this in mind, Company D may need to evaluate whether to buy door frames from Company S or make the door frames themselves. (Go around the CANTON FAIR in China, you make find china car parts batch prototype cooperated with more than three big car brands.) This way, the competitive market impact actually propagates into all companies in the supply chain.
In such a competitive, global environment, it is a buyer’s market, and is very favorable to the consumers. People will be able to purchase goods with good values. For a company to have sustained growth and earnings, it needs to build customer loyalty by creating high-value products in this very dynamic global market. This means that the products need to be low in cost and high in quality. This competitive environment has changed the sequence of product development. Take the Chinese plastic prototype manufacturers for instance.The traditional product development starts from an idea to engineering design. On the basis of the design, product cost is estimated to determine actual product pricing which in turn is used to assess the product market. Now due to the competitive buyers’ market, a world-class manufacturer will need to reverse the sequence of how a product is developed to be competitive. In other words, the trend is that a product is launched because of market requirement, and the market determines the product pricing which drives the product development cost. The engineers’ job is to make sure that the product can be designed and developed within the cost, quality, time, and function constraints. Such a global environment has placed numerous burdens On engineers.
The point here is to illustrate the impact of competitive manufacturing on the product development process, and it does not mean that the strategy of launching a product only when customers want it is the only correct option. Sometimes customers do not know what they want, and sometimes they cannot predict what they would want. For example, in the 1990s a huge emphasis was made by the automakers to make sport utility vehicles (SUVs), since there was a huge market demand for these vehicles. This proved to be not quite the correct decision, when the price of fuel shot up after 9/11. Large SUV sales are now languishing because they are not fuel efficient. As a result, customers are looking for more fuel efficient vehicles. Subsequently, the hybrid vehicle manufacturers are in a position to take advantage of this situation and this is a big factor in their inroads into the U.S. market. Some manufacturers were also very slow to catch onto the hybrid and diesel market and are now scrambling to license technology from European and Asian automakers. It is therefore important to watch global trends instead of focusing solely on the immediate customers. The mcclellan automation systems have been used by many factories in China.
This article is from https://www.rapidprototypechina.com.