Seminars, events, conferences etc. – you probably have invites coming out of your (digital) ears for all of the different events taking place. You may even have one sat in your inbox (or deleted items) for the upcoming ‘Transforming Manufacturing in the Cloud’ events that Autodesk are hosting in Bristol and Gateshead in November.
Hopefully, the email was of interest and you’ve already registered to attend or forwarded it on to someone who might find it interesting, either way one of the things we hear frequently from recipients of event invitations is....
- Why should I give up part of my day to attend your event?
- What’s in it for me and my company?
I’ll get straight to the point rather than pontificate about the plentiful supply of tea, coffee, juice, lunch etc. – it’s about showing you what you could be doing to ultimately make you (and your company) better than your competitors.
Competition is high on pretty much every manufacturers agenda, irrespective of where the competition is coming from, it’s a battle being fought on several fronts – cost, quality, innovation, profitability and time, to name just a handful.
- How do you (your business) compete?
- How do you make sure you are winning against your competition?
Competition isn’t something that just the sales guys need to make sure they combat – as design engineers, product designers and manufacturers, having a more competitive offering is well and truly in our hands – it’s something we should all be thinking about....
- How can we design it better?
- How can we reduce product costs?
- How can we improve quality?
- How can we use more cost effective components\materials?
- How can we get it delivered faster?
- How can we reduce the amount of rework?
- How do we get the right information to the right people at the right time?
....we should always be looking to improve in every little way possible to give us that competitive advantage.
Those who follow me on Twitter will no doubt have noticed I recently became a MAMiL – a 'Middle Aged Man in Lycra' - I took up road cycling! I’ve always been interested in cycling but only recently decided to actually get out on the roads in a 'semi-serious' way. One of the people within the cycling world that really interests me is the guy who masterminded the recent success of people like Sir Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome.
Dave Brailsford was the Performance Director of British Cycling and is currently General Manager of Team Sky, and it is he who defined the concept of....
“The aggregation of marginal gains”
...which is basically about looking for the “1% margin for improvement in everything you do” with the pure and simple goal of making his team more competitive than the others. I’m sure you already know the results he achieved from this approach.
Anyway, how does all of this answer the original question – “why should I give up part of my day to attend your event?”
The free events we are hosting in Bristol and Gateshead have been designed to show how UK manufacturers (of all sizes) can find those marginal gains and be more competitive using technology as the pillars for change.
We’ll discuss how Cloud technology is being adopted at a rapid rate and why – and answer question like what are the benefits of cloud technology for manufacturers?
We’ll also look at key technology pillars within manufacturing including PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) - where the fit, how they differ, where they overlap and the benefits of each.
The sole purpose of these events is that you come away at the end thinking to yourself about where those "1% gains" are within what you do and to help you see how technology can help you to deliver products and solutions better, faster and more profitibly than your competition.
If any of that has got you thinking and interested in knowing more about the events, you can get everything you need from the Autodesk PLM 360 website....
Click here for details of the Transforming Manufacturing in the Cloud events....
Hope to see you there.