Process Excellence through Innovation

ESO (Engineering Services Outsourcing) companies have to be goal-oriented to move up the value chain in this competitive world. The sole goal should be to achieve process excellence by means of quality adherence, compliance and productivity improvement. Innovative initiatives need to be driven in order to move up the ladder. As a whole, the overall process should be improved to get better output and efficiency. In this context, there are many industry recognised tools and practices that can help organisations to fair better in their regular businesses. Few of them are given below:

LEAN/Six-Sigma: The concept of LEAN is geared towards reducing waste in the process while Six-Sigma helps in achieving process excellence. Companies usually strive for process improvement by means of LEAN/Six-Sigma projects. These are industry recognised tool that are used across various sectors. The concept of six-sigma helps to clearly define process and set measurable goals/metrics to improve the overall process.

Automation/KBE: Automation and Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) helps ESO companies to strive for process excellence through innovation. There are several benefits of automation in any process, most obvious being reduction of manual work and errors. Apart from this, some other key benefits of automation include decrease in the processing time of various transactions, focus on other value add tasks and utilisation of less experienced task force. While carrying out daily business chores, there is always a possibility to implement automation of repeated tasks for improving the productivity. Tools can be interconnected for exchanging information and faster execution.

Knowledge Based Engineering is basically a process that helps to capture the knowledge during the course of product development. It is put to good use through optimisation with parameters and rules. KBE can also be easily integrated with knowledge (design) templates and then reused. Today, there is too much performance pressure on ESO companies. Thus, making use of KBE has become even more important. The need of KBE to achieve efficiency by adopting innovative platforms is also paramount, considering the cost factor and product development cycle. Formalising design and process development can help ESO companies to put good practices in place in order to reduce cost, design lapses and cycle time.

KBE makes use of rule based technologies for innovation, letting customer engineer focus more on new product initiatives and evaluation of multiple designs. Many people refer KBE as advanced automation as it helps in automated analysis of given inputs to generate engineering solutions. KBE has a broad scope and covers various activities related to multidisciplinary design optimization, analysis, product life cycle management and manufacturing.

While above mentioned industry recognised tools can surely be used to achieve operational excellence, it is not an end to the road of opportunities. The ESO companies should also be ready to imbibe and make use of other innovative practices to get a decisive edge in the market and move up the value chain.