Partner Article

Is China stepping up to higher value manufacturing?

Steve Winder, VP UK and Eire at Epicor Software, looks at recent research suggesting that Chinese businesses are stepping up their game to deliver higher value manufacturing.

Recent research suggests that Chinese businesses could be stepping up their game to deliver higher value and quality manufacturing – evidenced through reports from the country of greater effectiveness, higher software investment and responsiveness through collaboration and social media.

The research, by Redshift on behalf of Epicor Software, showed that 89% of Chinese organisations have made a significant investment in core business systems such as ERP software in the last two years, compared to 55% in the UK and just 43% in Singapore. This difference suggests that Chinese businesses could be either catching-up or overtaking other countries in the improvement of operational performance – which would indicate that China is likely to be vying for a share of the high value manufacturing space that the UK often thinks it serves itself best at.

Chinese organisations also claim to be leading the market in their ability to make responsive decisions, with 85% saying their business is either quite or very responsive. This was the highest of all ten countries surveyed in the research and compares with 65% in the UK.

Equally, ERP software which is used to manage business operations, is perceived as more effective and important in China. 97% of Chinese businesses said ERP was important or highly important compared to a low of 67% in Germany. And more respondents in China considered their ERP functions to be ‘state of the art’ than anywhere else – 23% compared to 11% in the UK.

Chinese businesses also seem the most likely to make use of social media and collaboration tools to improve their performance in the future. 80% in China said these tools will be important to their business compared to 52% in the UK and a low of just 23% in Finland.

Chinese businesses are clearly stepping up to deliver higher value products and services as they seek an increasingly key position on the world’s stage as a manufacturer. Across this research the country stood head and shoulders above all others in terms of their attitude to improving business performance.

In the future we could see China become a leader in manufacturing quality due to the fact that they appear to be adapting faster and investing more in up to date technology, including modern ERP software. This makes it easier to meet the important needs of the future, with ERP systems facilitating easy collaboration and giving users choice of access to their systems from any place or device. ERP also needs to be simple so that people can understand and interpret information and systems have to be responsive to allow people to access information when they need it.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Epicor Software .