Global SCM is biggest challenge in hi-tech product development: Infosys

Global supply chain management has been identified as the single biggest
challenge in hi-tech product development. In a survey conducted by Infosys at
the Electronics Supply Chain Association (ESCA) Spring 2005 Sympo-sium, an
overwhelming majority (70 percent) of supply chain executives confirmed that
managing global supply chain is the single biggest challenge in product
development for the hi-tech industry. The event saw participation by 170 supply
chain executives from 89 leading companies span-ning the semiconductor industry,
original equipment manufacturers, software vendors, distributors, and electronic
manufacturing service providers.

The survey also confirmed that time-to-market is critical in new product
introductions (43 percent), more so than quality of design (eight percent) or
product differen-tiation (34 percent). According to the company, results show a
strong indication from supply chain executives that in a rapidly changing
market, companies are willing to tradeoff optimization of product features,
performa-nce, cost and reliability, primarily because modular versions of the
product are introduced on subsequent releases as newer technolo-gies develop.

The survey findings also revealed collaboration amo-ngst design partners,
supp-liers, and customers is the key element of effective and integrated product
manage-ment and in the current new product development pro-cess the
collaboration environ-ment is sub-optimal.

In addition, the majority also indicated marketing and sales as well as
engineering were the primary influencers during the new product development
phase. Manufa-cturing received only three percent of the votes, showing a strong
disconnect between the perceptions of the roles played by the design and
manufacturing functions.

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