The focus on accountability and ensuring each workflow throughout a manufacturing operation is abiding by governance requirements is essential for protecting customer, company and supplier data. Too often manufacturers become too enamored with technology alone and forget to see the broader ethical and privacy implications of their decisions to invest in data-centric initiatives. The hard reality is that the more data-centric an initiative is the more oversight it requires to ensure ethicacy and clarity, and most of all to protect the data that is literally moving unprotected throughout production processes literally 24 hours a day.
How Information Technology Affects an Organization's Strategic Position
The collection of nascent technologies mentioned by Columbus (et.al) in the recent Forbes article taken together act as accelerators across all five dimensions of the Porter Five Forces Model. Beginning with the Threat of Substitute Products, the advent of big data analytics has the potential to reduce production costs while increasing supply chain coordination, leading to a wider variety of substitute products for manufacturers. Taken throughout an industry value chain, this translates into the redefining of an entire industry. Analytics combined with the performance gains from production efficiencies also increases the bargaining power of suppliers, many of which will gain greater insight into how best to manage their own supply chains for greater competitiveness. The series of technologies mentioned by Columbus (et.al.) also have immediate implications on the synchronization of suppliers network-wide as well. Big data analytics is directly contributing to the development and launch of new market entrants today as well, and this applies across all manufacturing industries. Insights gained from big data analytics can also provide insights into how best to aggregate dissimilar components together and create entirely new solutions to complex problems. The fourth element, bargaining power of buyers, is also being accelerated by all the technologies mentioned in the article as well. Buyers are increasingly sophisticated...
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