SPECIAL EDITION | May 2016 | SUPPLY & DEMAND CHAIN EXECUTIVE 7

E ngineers, scientists, researchers and other technical professionals are squarely in their CEOs’ crosshairs today. Senior management is

recognizing that these professionals’ value-added knowledge competencies have a direct impact on a company’s current and sustained performance.

As a result, the technical enterprise is feeling immense top-down corporate pressure to directly contribute to growing the business, driving efficiency, controlling costs and mitigating risks. In response, companies are moving to adopt a new generation of technical content and research solutions that allow these professionals to overcome information overload and focus on delivering increasing value to the business.

CEO OPTIMISM ... AND CONCERNSThe vast majority of CEOs are optimistic about

the economy as a whole and also bullish on their own businesses’ prospects over the coming three years, according to an annual CEO survey from KPMG. Senior executives envision the potential for “efficient growth, and the opportunity to leverage new technologies to enhance customer relationships and streamline operations,” KPMG reports.

But the picture isn’t all rosy: 72 percent of CEOs are concerned about the relevance of their companies’ products and services over the next three years, 90 percent fret about competitors taking their business, and 59 percent worry about new entrants disrupting their business models.

By Andy Reese FEATURE

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Use knowledge to turn the technical enterprise into a driver of profitability and growth

CATCH THE KNOWLEDGE

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Among these CEOs’ top concerns are product relevance, geographic expansion and understanding the regulatory environment. Meanwhile, risk management is not generally discussed among most companies, leaving them feeling vulnerable to a preventable failure or quality defect that jeopardizes their business.

The good news is that business leaders know innovation, market knowledge and technical know-how are all critical to their survival. In fact, 72 percent of the 300 leaders surveyed in 2015 say that innovation is very important to their company’s success right now.

DROWNING IN INFORMATIONSo what’s holding companies back from

achieving high levels of innovation? The truth is that many organizations today are struggling with the pace and complexity of engineering and other knowledge work within the technical enterprise.

Consider that engineers, scientists, researchers and other technical professionals handle a huge

volume of data sources, information and systems on a daily basis. They are drowning in information despite—or perhaps because of—the millions of dollars their

companies invested in technical content and IT systems intended to manage and deliver information. With data growing at a rate of 40 percent annually, 66 percent of decision-makers report they now have less time to make the best possible choices for their companies.

Overwhelmed by information, knowledge workers are unable to assess future technology and intellectual property (IP) needs, leverage existing IP, commercialize new ideas, or analyze regulatory, technological or market trends quickly enough to capitalize on opportunities or gain competitive advantage. As a result, their companies are:

❯❯ At risk and prone to product/process quality failures from an inability to leverage quality systems and other supplier/customer data sources.

❯❯ Held back by legacy designs and methods, and by traditional thinking that leaves no path forward on technical constraints, proprietary risks and subpar performance.

❯❯ Culpable for the use of outdated or erroneous public domain information instead of vetted and approved internal/external data, specifications and control documents.

❯❯ Underutilizing existing enterprise search tools and information systems that are easier to circumvent with Internet searches or by starting from scratch.

❯❯ Losing operating knowledge, practical know-how and professional experience from top senior technical talent exiting the workforce.

As a result, companies pay the ultimate price by having their technical workforces diverted from their core competencies, effectively losing millions of dollars a year in the process. After all, there are real costs associated with failing to keep pace with market trends, losing ground to the competition, being displaced by new entrants, failing to meet launch dates, and lacking the inventiveness to introduce new products or processes that drive growth and create profitability.

Such opportunity costs can be hard to quantify, but they can add up to millions of dollars in lost opportunities on a daily basis for companies around the globe. For instance, if you could shave two to four weeks’ worth of time off a project that you are working on, what would the ultimate time savings amount to in terms of business benefit? What if you could reduce that time by two to four months—what would that equate to?

42%How much time engineers and other knowledge workers spend seeking, processing, collaborating and sharing information—time they could use to solve problems. Source: IDC Research & IHS Independent Analysis

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SPECIAL EDITION | May 2016 | SUPPLY & DEMAND CHAIN EXECUTIVE 9

FEATURE

THE HIGH COST OF INFORMATION AND INDECISION

In addition to being ubiquitous, information is also expensive. In fact, many organizations are likely paying 10 to 40 percent more than they should to acquire basic technical content (standards, reference books, patents, journals, etc.).

These excessive costs can be attributed to decentralized, uncoordinated or maverick purchases of hundreds, thousands or potentially millions of documents from disparate sources—service data object (SDO) storefronts, individual publishers, document distributors, and even dubious e-commerce sites selling outdated or bootleg materials in violation of copyright laws.

The risks associated with information can be expensive, too. Using unapproved or erroneous data in the design cycle are obvious examples in which using the wrong information can have catastrophic consequences. But the technical organization is often a virtual blind spot for senior management when it

comes to understanding potential hidden risks.For example, when knowledge workers invest

more time seeking information than actually using it, the risk increases that a potential product failure slips through a review. Knowledge workers

are hired, trained and employed for their know-how and experience. But they are burying their heads in data, documents and systems in search of needed answers, spending 30 to 50 percent of their time gathering, managing and sharing information, according to industry

surveys. As a result, they are diverted from the value-added tasks that drive corporate performance and the risks become all too real.

BARRIERS TO CHANGEMaking the connection between information

overload and subpar corporate performance is pretty straightforward, but figuring out what to do about it is more complex. After all, over the past decades, companies invested in multiple systems to improve technical workflows, whether

120%How much the average new product development project exceeds its schedule.Source: The Center for New Product Development: The Cost of Project Inefficiency. US National Institute for Science & Technology

It Pays to Connect Knowledge Workers with Critical Tools and InsightsWith more than 70 percent of CEOs viewing innovation as very important to organizational success right now, knowledge workers need a technology platform that allows them to foresee new technol-ogy and intellectual properties, make informed strategies, find new markets for existing products and accelerate innovation. According to industry research, technical workforces that are equipped with these insights can:

W More rapidly transform consumer, competitor or market intelligence into new and differentiated product designs or development ideas.

W Reduce product development cycle times.

W Break through technical constraints (i.e., a regulation or blocking patent that looks insurmountable).

W Collaborate more effectively to reduce time to market, and improve innovation and validation processes.

W Enhance quality management and prevent failures, thereby improving customer satisfaction, avoiding rework and repair, and minimizing major threats or risk to the enterprise.

W Extract knowledge from vetted and approved control documents, systems and data to minimize risk exposure and increase productivity.

W Increase the use of existing IT systems and investments to raise productivity, thus eliminating inefficient, costly, and risky or maverick practices.

W Formally implement knowledge transfer to ensure the preservation, accessibility or optimization of senior technical resources and/or specialized technical talent that moves within (or exits) the enterprise.

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computer-aided design (CAD), product lifecycle management (PLM), content management systems and so on. Even with all these tools and platforms, organizations struggle to get optimal performance out of their technical enterprise. Why?

There are several reasons. To begin with, solution providers traditionally come at this challenge from either a content perspective or a tool perspective, rather than linking the two by layering analytical capabilities atop a foundation of essential content. In addition, without search technology that can integrate various external and internal content sources, technical professionals are left to log in to multiple systems, aggregate information on their own and then figure out how to integrate the data into disparate analytical tools.

Furthermore, the many enterprise search tools or other technologies that were available to companies to date traditionally required customization and development. They also lacked the rich functionality needed by knowledge workers to fulfill their specific tasks and activities in the context of their technical workflows.

For instance, to conduct root cause analysis (RCA), typically an engineer had to deploy generic technology first, then customize it for specific tasks associated with RCA. The content itself poses another challenge due to a dependency on aligning internal data and systems with external technical content to complete tasks. Put simply, generic technology alone cannot solve the problem.

Ultimately, without the appropriate content, analytics, and tools brought together in a holistic and well-orchestrated manner, corporations are typically left overspending and underachieving. They fail to truly turn the tide in their favor, unable to achieve their full potential as knowledge-driven technical enterprises.

ESCAPE THE INFORMATION ABYSSHow, then, can you approach this challenge?

You can start by stepping aside and asking yourself this question: If my organization was drowning in information and if this situation was draining our performance as a company, then what solution would I put in place to rise above the information, restore order, and get my knowledge workers back to innovating and creative problem-solving?

Based on more than 55 years of experience providing essential content to the technical

community, IHS is seeing successful companies start by giving their technical professionals a single go-to source for the content and documents they need to do their work. That includes internal content drawn from structured and unstructured systems, like PLM, CAD, enterprise resource planning (ERP), shared drives, SharePoint and so on. It also includes external content like industry standards and specifications, e-books from leading technical publishers, journal articles, patents and other sources of technical information.

The next step is to apply next-generation search technology and content analytics to allow knowledge workers to quickly drill down to relevant answers within all this content without getting bogged down. Finally, companies are leveraging specialized problem-solving tools and techniques tailored to the specific needs of the technical enterprise, allowing their knowledge professionals to analyze and draw intelligence from all the content at their disposal.

THROW YOUR ENGINEERS A LIFE RING

The benefits of supporting the technical enterprise with this sort of three-legged platform—built on content, next-generation search technology, and tools designed by and for technical professionals—can be substantial. Put bluntly, knowledge-based organizations outperform their peers.

30%Reduction in research time when using a technical knowledge management platform that combines content, next-generation search technology and research tools.Source: IHS research based on customer successes

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Industry research shows that engineers and other technical workers at these organizations spend 30 percent less time looking for information, they’re 15 times faster when it comes to leveraging information, and they’re 30 percent more likely to find what they’re looking for when they need it. Based on industry estimates, these performance improvements within the technical enterprise translate into two times greater shareholder returns, four times greater return on revenues, and three-and-a-half times greater return on assets for an organization as a whole.

Imagine the impact that these improvements would have on your own organization. What would that actually translate into in terms of your ability to meet your business goals and objectives? Would you be able to lower your costs? Increase systems’ return on investment? Increase productivity? Cut two to four months’ time to market off a key project or deliverable? Deliver a 70 percent or greater improvement to your ideation practices? Reduce defects and failures by 200 percent? The possibilities are endless, and the platform that can enable these and other results is within reach.

As you begin to think differently about your organization and its dependency on information, you can envision the content, analytics and technology that can eradicate information overload, throw your engineers a life ring, and restore your organization’s focus on innovative, creative and inventive practices.

With CEOs’ top concerns resting on the shoulders of the technical enterprise right now, being able to fluidly provide the information and insight that knowledge workers need to fulfill their missions is critical. A knowledge-based organization does exactly that and, in doing so, helps its CEO drive company success in the marketplace.

Unleash the Technical EnterpriseIt’s time for organizations to combine content, search and analytics to make a leap and become the knowledge-driven, innovative enterprises they aspire to be. That’s where IHS En-gineering Workbench comes in. It’s the only rapidly deployed, next-generation platform for the technical enterprise that pro-vides global organizations with a complete and comprehen-sive set of content, next-generation search capabilities, and advanced tools to drive profitable growth and competitive advantage from the technical workforce. Using the platform, companies can effectively arm knowledge workers with the technical expertise they require without bogging them down with superfluous data.

Innovative and groundbreaking in its own right, Engineering Workbench connects engineering, scientific and technical professionals—and internal communities across the technical enterprise—with more than 110 million must-have engineer-ing and technical reference books, patents, technical articles, reports, design principles and other essential content. It also connects these workers to their own internal knowledge sources, and helps them foster knowledge retention, transfer and discovery, while using next-generation search technology to extract answers and derive insights from internal and ex-ternal content sources. Furthermore, Engineering Workbench provides advanced research, problem-solving and analytical tools (such as root cause analysis, technology and patent trend analysis, and consumer insights or intelligence) to extract product ideas from social media.

Engineering Workbench reduces the total cost of ownership of information and technology purchases, while increasing the return on investment of existing information and technology across the enterprise. Tailored to the unique needs of enter-prise knowledge workers, Engineering Workbench empowers business leaders to equip their technical workforce with a holistic, lightweight framework consisting of vetted techni-cal content, advanced research capabilities and a consistent user experience that’s designed specifically for the technical audience. This, in turn, enables the processes and activities as-sociated with knowledge work, and helps improve innovation, drive operational efficiency, control costs and mitigate risk.

With Engineering Workbench, scientists, researchers, engi-neers, technicians and other knowledge workers finally have a single information, analytics, problem-solving and deci-sion-support platform. This enables information-laden organi-zations to transform into knowledge-driven corporations that benefit from improved product quality, faster time to market, reduced costs, global opportunities, better regulatory compli-ance and improved customer satisfaction.

Empower your engineering community with IHS Engineer-ing Workbench. Learn more at www.ihs.com/ewb.

ANDY REESE is a senior manager in Product Design at IHS, responsible for the IHS technical reference solutions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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