TMG helps manufacturers deliver best of class customer experiences through digital transformation, commerce, and cloud-native solutions

TMG helps manufacturers by acquiring, engaging, activating, and retaining customers by delivering differentiated capabilities through technology.

• D2C and B2B Commerce Capabilities
• Technology Consolidation and Digital transformation
• IoT, Empowered Edge Experience
• Business Intelligence, Analytics, and Big Data
• Propensity modeling and Experience Personalization
• Cloud-native Migrations, Serverless and Parallel Computing

Industries

• Aerospace and Defence
• Heavy Machinery
• Major Appliances
• Healthcare
• Retail

 

TMG’s 2021 Manufacturers Outlook

With strong investments in digital commerce and customer experience continuing through 2021, many brands are experiencing loyalty shock as competitors begin to differentiate their offerings in response to the ongoing global pandemic, and consumers take advantage of increased value and lower total cost of ownership.

Businesses with less technical debt and lower investment in legacy systems have capitalized on modern technology providing faster turnaround times for new products and services. Businesses with increased technical debt are looking for opportunities to abstract legacy foundations for future replacement or headless implementations

• CIO’s are looking for opportunities to lower capital investments to enable more flexibility to address changing market conditions with increased operational budgets, and evaluating new opportunities to derive value from existing transactional, IoT, and experience data, as well as expanding on back end integrations to create seamless omnichannel customer experiences to improve retention and minimize churn.
• CMO’s are investing in solutions that create tailored, end-to-end customer journeys through real-time optimization, and personalized digital experiences that accurately represent customer total lifetime value, rewarding loyalty, and helping convert new customers who are evaluating new products and services quickly and efficiently through accurate segmentation.

IT Cost and Portfolio Modernization

Identifying the true cost of ownership for the asset and software portfolio can be an elusive target. We will provide best practices to assess and plan a roadmap for a scalable and sustainable IT portfolio. This extends to using technology to optimize physical asset availability.

Technologies are rapidly evolving, and new technologies challenge the well-established vendors across many verticals, and budgets are shifting from capital to operational offering businesses more control over how their money is spent and creating leverage to adapt to changing market conditions. In particular, manufacturers are increasingly taking the opportunity to connect more closely with end users through Direct to Consumer (D2C) commerce, Software as a Service (SaaS) products, and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities.

Customer centricity requires the ability to respond to evolving needs and expectations of customers by understanding their behavior and personalizing their experiences, capabilities of competitive solutions, new solutions available to the market, and operational excellence to be able to continue to deliver and the agility to capitalize on emerging trends.

TMG helps manufacturers develop digital transformation roadmaps to align technology adoption with organizational agility and culture to improve return on investment, increase delivery efficiency and reduce total cost of ownership. Businesses prefer to invest in operational budgets in Cloud and SaaS technologies, rather than capital investments in perpetual or term licensing benefits in selecting new, disruptive technologies as they become available.

IT/OT/ET Integration, Empowered Edge, IoT, AI+ML

The 2021 CIO Gartner survey identified significantly increased expectations (74% or higher among manufacturing sectors) of CIOs to deliver higher-value, more strategic contributions. Accordingly, we will examine the synergies and exponential impacts from operational technology (OT), engineering technology (ET), IT, the empowered edge, and the capabilities of the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and digital twins.

Consumers and businesses alike have an increasing demand for analytics to optimize processes and enhance experiences. IoT data collection combined with predictive analytics allows businesses to meet anticipated customer expectations improving overall satisfaction and engagement and reducing the load on support systems.

Manufacturers are focusing on long term customer relationships and reinforcing their brand equity through ongoing omni-channel touchpoints with business partners and end users. Marketing, engineering, IT, support and operations are becoming increasingly integrated through clearly defined service blueprints that support customer journeys. Streamlined interactions with customers improves overall customer satisfaction, increasing deal size and frequency, and reducing attrition.

TMG helps manufacturers such as Bobcat by aligning IoT for connected machines in the field, with customer facing solutions such as fleet management for both dealers and customers, and helping to define the strategy for edge computing and big-data analytics pipelines required to collect, distribute and empower their integrated technologies.

Business intelligence and propensity modeling allows corporations to plan for changing market conditions and consumer trends, and collecting first-party data is increasingly in demand.

Today’s consumer and industrial products generate tremendous amounts of data, straining wireless bandwidths and data analytics pipelines alike.

While many businesses can collect and report on collected data, much data ends up in data warehouses with untapped potential insights. With strained bandwidth and compute pipelines, IoT devices typically send restricted data sets, and new solutions to edge computing are increasingly necessary to preprocess data at the edge, reducing latency, creating more responsive customer facing solutions, as well as optimize and standardize data models via IoT digital twins.

Digital products and customer experience

Consumer goods (CG) companies must prioritize efforts to explore and enhance digital products and the customer/consumer experience. Gartner’s top strategic technology trend, total experience, is the interlinking of both the customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) for a better user experience (UX) across multi-experience (MX) platforms. Our research will explore how this impacts manufacturing within the factory as well as with customers, and directly with consumers.

Manufacturers are facing brand dilution with new digital marketplaces, and being listed alongside inferior products or knock offs. Selling directly to consumers allows
manufacturers to realize higher margins, and consumers who know what they want, go to the source.

Manufacturers often provide consumers with competitive analysis, but no opportunity to activate the purchase without redirecting to a dealer who makes the profit, and the manufacturer then needs to provide ongoing support to customers for warranty, or connected product experiences. There is an opportunity to capitalize on customer acquisition, engagement and retention by providing and reinforcing the relationship between consumer and manufacturer.

The total cost of customer ownership for manufacturers is increasing, with new expectations for connected products, IoT, and ongoing software and firmware enhancements to existing products. IoT provides increased value for customers, as well as additional insight into customer behaviors and preferences which can lead to increased customer retention through propensity modeling, and appropriate strategies for expanded products and digital services drives customer loyalty.

AI+ML insights lead to new value streams, and enables manufacturers to calculate customer lifetime value, propensity, and next best action. Manufacturers need insight into social, online, and offline customer interactions. All interactions require analysis to identify churn and improve customer satisfaction and engagement.

TMG has recently helped an appliance manufacturer create and establish it’s digital platform. Over the course of 2 years, our partnership contributed to a 5,000% increase in revenue; TMG was instrumental in achieving this growth through a digital transformation journey that prepared our client to navigate the pandemic with relative ease.f