First, an explanation of what DAMASA means … Design (or Develop) Anywhere, Manufacture (or Make) Anywhere and Service Anywhere. Why does this matter? Because in the end, it’s the most important measure of operational flexibility and agility, and ultimately leads to competitive advantage, revenue growth and greater productivity.
The ability to efficiently manufacture or make anywhere requires that you standardize product information, operational capacity and manufacturing intelligence to enable rapid response to dynamic changes in market demand. Responses may include transferring production from one location to another, producing simultaneously at multiple locations or building out new capacity in emerging markets.
Standardizing product and process information along with engineering change processes helps you achieve requisite quality levels to meet customer requirements regardless of where the product is sourced. This also enables more optimal asset utilization and a predictable average cost structure. At the end of the day, manufactures really have little choice but to embrace a Develop Anywhere, Make Anywhere strategy to compete on the global stage.
Design anywhere means you can be more selective in where you locate your R&D operations, improving collaboration and optimizing design capabilities by utilizing localized design capacity around the world. What results is faster and more effective adaptation to local markets; many of these markets, like India and China, are growing much faster than in more mature economies. Design transfer capability must also extend beyond corporate boundaries. Manufacturers today rely much more on their supply networks and may outsource not only manufacturing, but specific component design, say for those outside core competencies that do not add any product differentiation. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum companies may rely on outsource capability for specialized knowledge or capabilities as a means to help drive innovation.
Service Anywhere means providing after sales support for your product or service, regardless of where your customer does business or purchased your product. Many manufacturers are repatriating once outsourced service capacity as a way to grow revenues and improve knowledge of customers and in-field product performance. Effectively servicing your product requires strong unit-level trace and genealogy capability and the ability to provide current “as maintained” information to your service organization. This ensures that the service organization has the right version information for the product, and can update information as parts are serviced or replaced. Owning the service element provides a stronger possibility of getting knowledge and feedback from the field, such as component and assembly failure rates and analysis, mean time to repair, etc., and incorporating this knowledge back into the engineering processes. This process can accelerate continuous improvement and power a virtuous circle of innovation.
So, how do you accomplish this organizational and operational “nirvana”? In my next post, I will go into further detail and describe 5 steps that can help you to move your organization towards accomplishing this objective.
