Building Trust with Contract Manufacturers through Data
Many of today’s top product brands rely on external contract manufacturers (CM) to produce some or all the products that they sell. This partnership allows product companies to focus on design, innovation, and sales while CMs provide cost-effective production at scale. Both organizations depend on one another; trust is critical to the long-term stability of these partnerships. Trust is built through an ongoing relationship where the contract manufacturer should adequately meet these expectations:
- Transparent cost estimates, output forecasting, and overall contract manufacturing performance during initial contract evaluations
- Continuous, on-time delivery of supply orders with reasonable advance notification of any issues or delays
- Unit quality and reliability in line with specifications and customer expectations for the product’s brand
NI Lifecycle Solution for Contract Manufacturing Management
- The NI Lifecycle Collect, Detect, and Act solution framework creates a centralized view of relevant product data to manage contract manufacturing relationships.
- Data connections, guidelines, and translation layers Collect data from all contract manufacturing partners and ingest it into a single platform.
- A common data format with broad tracking of all manufacturing output leads to data-driven Detection of anomalies or issues.
- Predefined Action responses and alerts notify the appropriate stakeholders of relevant situations to quickly implement resolutions.
- A shared methodology for contract manufacturing KPIs creates a single source of truth to benchmark relative performance and Act on those insights with the right decisions.
Solution Advantages
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Builds a stable and complete pipeline of data from all contract manufacturing sources.
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Offers prebuilt and customizable dashboards, visualizations, and analytics to deliver the right KPIs to the right stakeholders in near real-time.
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Enables processing all contract manufacturing data through data-driven rules with predefined responses to catch and fix production issues fast.
See How You Can Improve Your Contract Manufacturing Management
By ingesting all contract manufacturing data into a centralized location and unified format, NI OptimalPlus applications can process results into a set of common KPIs and generate data-driven alerts and responses to issues.
Data-Driven Contract Manufacturing Management
Instead of costly direct oversight of CM operations, use data to create a trusting relationship with CM partners. Use a common data platform to collect data from all CMs to track production results and benchmark CM partners across a common set of KPIs.
Build Your Solution with the NI Ecosystem
NI offers a variety of solution integration options customized to your application-specific requirements. You can use your own internal integration teams for full system control or leverage the expertise of NI and our worldwide NI Partner Network to obtain a turnkey solution.
The NI Partner Network is a global community of domain, application, and overall test development experts working closely with NI to meet the needs of the engineering community. NI Partners are trusted solution providers, systems integrators, consultants, product developers, and services and sales channel experts skilled across a wide range of industries and application areas.
NI Enterprise Solutions provide architecture and applications that improve product life cycle performance. NI service teams offer dedicated data science, engineering, and project management resources to guide users through complete data mapping and focused deliverables for successful solution deployment. Talk to your NI representative about service options while learning more about NI Enterprise Solutions.
An NI Partner is a business entity independent from NI and has no agency or joint-venture relationship and does not form part of any business associations with NI.