Overview
Engineering industry is a broad, sweeping term that covers many organizations which provide engineering components – either standalone or turnkey or partly assembled for their clients. The clientele served by this industry is diverse. It includes sectors such as infrastructure, energy, automotive, steel, mining, etc.
The Indian Engineering Industry market size is estimated to be $125 billion in 2017. The global potential for business is likely to be several times this figure. The industry is broadly classified into the following.
- Large, Diversified suppliers who serve multiple sectors and also offer turnkey solutions. To be successful, these companies must work on developing engineering expertise as well as excellent project execution capabilities.
- Contract manufacturers who work on specific products on behalf of customers. For these companies, it is critical to identify the product and client portfolio and be able to meet the customer expectations.
Challenges
Regardless of the type of organization, there are a number of challenges that organizations working in the engineering industry are facing. Here are just some of the issues that are common across the industry.
- Global Competition: The sourcing of engineering components is truly a global endeavour now and companies have to be prepared for competition from any organization worldwide.
- Pricing: As components and projects become standardized and commoditized, there is tremendous pressure on pricing. This is further exacerbated by the fluctuations in the cost of inputs such as steel, energy, etc.
- Shrinking Product life-cycle and high rate of change: Gone are the days when a single component could be the mainstay of a company for years. The rate of change is very rapid and companies need to build flexible life-cycles and facilities to serve multiple customers and their changing demands.
- Lack of skilled man-power: The industry has seen steady erosion in the supply of skilled and qualified engineers. There is a shortage of core technical as well as project management skills. This is especially hurtful as engineering is a highly knowledge intensive industry.
Solutions
PMSoft has been working with global engineering companies across the value chain for over 13 years and understands these challenges. Here are some of the ways in which PMSoft has been helping engineering companies.
- Concept to Commercialization: PMSoft helps map the end-to-end process for Product development. Many product oriented companies make the error of assuming that tight project management will solve their problems. It doesn’t. The focus has to be on the PRODUCT and not the PROJECT. Each product is unique and the stages in its life-cycle need to be managed holistically – all the way from concept to commercialization.
- Agile product development: Flexibility and rapid deployment cycles is the need of the hour. PMSoft helps bring in Agility in the business. Agile methods are widely adopted in the software industry but the conventional industry has been slow in changing their thinking. PMSoft can help build an incremental and iterative development cycle that makes the organization much more flexible and adaptable to the customer needs.
- Knowledge Management and Dashboards: PMSoft has the expertise to suggest and implement the IT systems at the backend of the development process to help build a knowledge repository for the organization. Also, it gives the executive management access to dashboards with real time visibility into the development projects.
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