The two biggest challenges that I hear companies facing today, the first one are competitive challenges, used to be GM competing with Ford, competing with Stellantis. Well, now they’re competing with global competitors coming from other regions of the world like China, and so that’s making it much more challenging because they operate at a different speed. We’ve had examples from our customers where they might take a few weeks to do a quote, their Chinese competitors do it in five days, and they need to operate at what they call China speed, so the ability to operate faster in today’s market is critical. Here are a lot of conversations about digital twin, the digital thread, digital manufacturing, digital prototyping that has to happen to address to these competitive challenges because so much of it is around speed.
The other part that I hear all over the place is cost. The macroeconomic challenges in today’s market are creating significant cost challenges, if you looked at the PMI numbers that came out just last week from the ISM, manufacturing is in a challenging market right now.
Inflation has created challenges in terms of being able to invest to drive new product programs, but the traditional cost challenges that have faced manufacturers still proliferate, whether it’s, you know, labor rates are going up because of scarce resources. You need these skilled resources where you’re gonna get them all you have to pay more, it could be material prices, copper prices are all over the map. Those kinds of things still continue to impact it. And then with the elections just concluding, people are unsure about what’s gonna happen with tariffs. So, getting their arms around cost, trying to ensure that they’re gonna hit the margin goals that they’ve said at the beginning of a program, when a product design cycle might take 18, 24 months, lots of things happened during that 18 to 24 month period that you have to continually factor in, and unless you have a way to do that real time, it creates real challenges to meet the cost challenges, and then it makes competing with these new players even more challenging.
