Industrial machinery and battery machine building company leaders now face two competing and contradictory constraints: satisfying target requirements and keeping up with development schedules, according to the 2020 Engineering Executive’s Strategic Agenda study. Additionally, mounting and multi-faceted complexity prevents companies from meeting these competing goals and slows down the development process. The pandemic has increased organizational complexity thanks to enforced remote working initiatives, and companies in the industrial machinery sector, including battery machine builders, must continue to adapt to these changes. The study’s findings laid bare these challenges.

Forty-six percent of study respondents stated that fewer than six in 10 of their product development projects meet their launch or delivery deadlines. As a result, product development performance is lagging for many organizations, directly impacting key performance indicators (KPIs).

Based on these findings, Lifecycle Insights recommends the following:

• Companies should modernize development processes and technologies to mitigate the risks associated with rising product complexity.
• Companies should deploy solutions with comprehensive, integrated capabilities that can grow with their needs. These include:
  • requirements management, linking not only requirements but disparate engineering domains and functional departments;
  • multidisciplinary BOM management capabilities to synchronize, track, and seamlessly manage multidisciplinary BOMs, mitigating product complexity; and
  • project and program management capabilities across engineering disciplines and functional departments, tying development together and empowering proactive action.
• Companies should consider using cloud-based SaaS PLM solutions that require minimal IT support. These solutions also provide embedded best practices and easy cross-systems integrations with requirements management, multidisciplinary BOM management, and project and program management capabilities.