Getting new products to market quickly and efficiently is challenging for many businesses. The challenge is significant for manufacturers of custom or semi-custom products, as traditional design processes can often take significantly longer than standard product workflows.
Design automation and CPQ technology enable manufacturers of custom products to streamline complex design processes, reduce costs, and get their products to market quicker.
This blog explores how DriveWorks design automation and CPQ technology can reduce your design times, help you deliver custom products to market as quickly as competitors deliver standard offerings, and cut down on overall costs.
The importance of speed to market
The speed at which manufacturers can deliver custom products directly impacts their market share, revenue, and brand loyalty. However, bringing innovative and customized products to market requires time-consuming design phases and extensive rounds of revisions, potentially leaving them months behind competitors who are focused solely on standard products.
B2B purchases often involve multiple stakeholders so the ability to provide 3D visualization for different configuration options and to automatically produce the quote documentation and data for approval can give manufacturers a significant competitive advantage.
DriveWorks design automation for SOLIDWORKS provides a solution to those challenges through the automation of repetitive engineering design tasks, accelerating the design process, and reducing the levels of manual labor associated with product development and custom configuration.
Reducing design times with automation
DriveWorks design automation technology removes inefficiencies by automating repetitive tasks. Manual steps, revisions, and back-and-forth dialogue between departments can often cause bottlenecks in traditional product design. DriveWorks intelligent technology automates these steps and streamlines inter-department workflows, ensuring that a considerable portion of the design work can be done in a fraction of the time.
Key benefits of reduced design times include:
Product innovation: By automating repetitive design tasks, design engineers have more time to focus on new product development enabling manufacturers to get new products to market quicker.
Real-time revisions: Design automation enables design engineers to make changes and updates in real-time, with immediate visualization of the impacts on the final product.
Automated workflows: With tasks like configuration and design validation integrated into an automated workflow, time spent on each phase is minimized and products move quickly from design through to sales and production teams.
Delivering custom products to market with speed
Custom products can take longer to design, sell and manufacture because of the volume of configuration options. DriveWorks design automation and CPQ technology streamlines these processes to enable manufacturers to accelerate their speed to market and close the gap between custom and standard products.
Key benefits of increased speed to market include:
Competitive advantage: The ability to deliver custom products quickly gives manufacturers a significant advantage over their competitors. B2B buyers value the ease with which they can configure custom products and the speed at which they can be produced and delivered. They are key factors for purchase consideration and give manufacturers a competitive advantage over competitors using traditional processes.
Increased sales via distributors: Manufacturers who deliver custom products quicker make it easier for sales distributors and resellers to sell more of their products. For sales distributors and resellers selling similar products from different manufacturers, products that can be easily configured and quickly designed will stand out amongst similar products that don’t offer the same flexibility.
Making costs savings
In addition to reducing time-to-market, DriveWorks design automation and CPQ technology can significantly cut costs across the design, development, and production phases. Design automation reduces reliance on manual labor for repetitive tasks, minimizes costly errors and rework, and ensures a smoother transition from design to production.
Cost-saving benefits include:
Reduced labor costs: Automating repetitive design tasks reduces the need for work on lower business value manual operations. This means that design engineers can be reallocated to work on higher-value projects such as new product development.
Increased budget for new product development: By reducing design times and streamlining processes, overhead and running costs are lower, freeing up budget to be re-assigned to new product development tasks, such as prototype development, market research, etc.
How DriveWorks customers have accelerated their speed to market
DriveWorks technology is used by manufacturers across a range of industries all over the world to streamline their processes and improve their speed to market.
Learn more about how customers are using DriveWorks design automation and CPQ technology to accelerate their speed to market.