The market research institute RAAD Research surveyed 800 finance and IT managers from SMEs with an average of 100 - 500 employees. Only the metal industry, mechanical engineering, vehicle construction and apparatus engineering sectors were surveyed. The surprising result of the study was that 13% of manufacturing companies are planning to open new domestic and foreign locations in the next two years. Despite these planned expansions, a quarter of the respondents stated that they only had selective IT data exchange. 13 percent of participants even stated that they were not networked at all and did not see any need for this.
However, the importance of consolidated IT landscapes will play an increasingly important role in the future. Increasing competitive and cost pressure, more customer service, company mergers: The reasons for distributed locations are as varied as the companies themselves. ERP or PDM systems such as Teamcenter Multisite can help here.
In summary, the critical requirements for global product development are
- Performance - The solution must have minimal system requirements
- Support for different network topologies - LAN, WAN and mobile connections must be equally supported. The solution must be able to guarantee perfect use of the system at all times.
- Security - the solution must be globally secure
- Data integrity - The solution must ensure that only the master instance of an object can be changed.
- Fault tolerance - the failure of the central administration must not hinder other locations
- Scalability - the solution must be able to grow with the company and handle large numbers of users
- Flexibility - companies need to be able to set up or remove sites quickly and easily.