Manufacturing SMEs see collaboration as top priority, survey says

The study, entitled ‘Getting Serious About Collaboration: How Companies are Transforming Their Business Networks’ and conducted by BusinessWeek Research Services, indicates a majority intending to expand collaboration and expecting their IT to deliver the goods. Why? Approximately one out of three respondents identified access to new markets and customers as one of the top benefits, while roughly half said they are currently counting on partners for R&D, manufacturing, marketing, logistics, distribution, customer service and HR – and two-thirds expect to be reliant on third parties for these functions to some extent by 2011. As Jeff Weedman, vice president for external business development at Procter & Gamble, put it: “The reason we had to [collaborate] was that the world had changed. Only about one-third of the products we brought to market were successes. The fast-followers were getting faster, and the retailers were increasingly our competitors…Over time, we’ve been able to understand networks and the value of them, so we’ve added places to look for ideas and technologies.” And manufacturing SMEs in particular take that further – with collaboration skyrocketing as these companies recognise the value of co-innovation with partners as a pathway to growth. Zia Yusuf, executive vice president, Global Ecosystem and Partner Group at SAP, makes the point that, as the role of collaboration changes, the need for a robust IT infrastructure becomes even more critical. And given that only half of the C-level executives responding to the survey were confident that their IT infrastructures would be able to cope, there’s work to be done. “SAP itself is a practitioner of business network transformation through collaboration,” she says. “The SAP ecosystem brings together diverse relationships, resources, and communities to help create the next generation of technology solutions in concert with our own development efforts.”