Recessions offer major opportunities for everyone who likes to innovate. Engineering or sales, strategy, and tactic – there are usually plenty of opportunities to make it happen during the downturn. It can be a good time to introduce game-changing offerings or simple and affordable solutions to break the current status quo. It is also a bold and strategic move for acquisition to prepare for a business to rebound. One of the big characteristics of a recession is resource scarcity, which forces innovators to do things they should have been doing already such as: making careful changes, cutting costs, making important strategic experiments, and sharing risks of innovation with other members of the value chain.

Are we going to see a spike in PLM Innovation?

Innovation is key to success, especially during difficult times. When business is slow, it’s more important than ever to find new and inventive ways to increase productivity and efficiency. In this blog post, we’ll explore seven ways you can innovate in PLM during a downturn. Keep reading to learn more!

Will PLM business be at risk during the economic slowdown? I had a meeting earlier this week where this question was asked. The way the question was asked is like this – the economy is bad, so PLM business will be contracted. Here is my perspective on why an economic downturn can be the best opportunity for existing and new PLM businesses.

PLM and Downturn Low-Hanging Fruits

Here I bring some ideas about how PLM vendors and industrial companies can innovate in PLM to perform better cut costs, fight supply chain issues, or gain new businesses.

Rethink the Legacy

Challenging the status quo and finally finding the time to get rid of expensive legacy. Surviving the downturn requires business thinking and innovation. It can bring the need to have support and new systems (especially for the digital economy).

Force Companies To Move Faster

PLM is not the fastest business when it comes to the decision point. Companies can literally sit on their “PLM decision” for a few years. For all these “sitting on the fence” companies, a downturn can be a trigger to stop dreaming and make some decisions.

Though time brings good decisions

When the time is not good companies are forced to solve problems with low budgets and cut “fancy thinking”. For PLM, it means that companies will be more concerned about their bottom line and how to achieve goals. Big companies can decide to move with a pragmatic approach and stop chasing their “big PLM dream”.

New SaaS PLM Solutions

When COVID forced everyone out of their offices, companies looked for solutions to help them to manage data and communicate remotely. The same will happen now, the downturn gives an opportunity for new SaaS businesses to offer new efficient solutions with quick ROI. Modern SaaS PLM solutions are much connected. Product lifecycle management can help to establish cost control and focus on the bottom line. For many companies, it is important as ever.

Supply Chain and Global Market

The challenges of supply chain and contract manufacturing in different countries are well known. Another lockdown or missing components can become a big challenge for companies to deliver their products. PLM is a foundation of business processes allowing to the establishment of data that can be used in supply chain management to get the right information to multiple vendors. Once the data is ready and can easy shared with multiple contractors and suppliers, companies can easier to operate and use digital competitive advantage against other companies that are stuck with legacy platforms.

Making IP Available Leads to Technological Innovation

Information is the main source of innovation in a company. One of the functions of PL is to make information available in the company and by doing so, help manufacturing businesses to focus on IP and innovate. Sharing data is an important function and information availability is key here.

What is my conclusion?

Times are tough, but that doesn’t mean your business should stop innovating. In fact, now might be the perfect time to amp up your efforts, make some critical decisions, find better cost-effectivity solutions and optimize your business to perform better during the downturn. I shared some of my ideas with you. These are just my thoughts… What do you think?

Best, Oleg

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing a digital cloud-native PDM & PLM platform that manages product data and connects manufacturers, construction companies, and their supply chain networks. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.

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