PM-Professional Switzerland - Programs and Projects for Innovation

  First was the Covid, then the war and the political crisis between USA and China have contributed heavily to highlighting the weak strategy in supply chain management for the majority of the companies worldwide. Usually, we hope the "quality is inbuilt" into the product we buy, but this is not. Quality also means meeting the expectation of the customers in terms of lead time and "serviceability" of the product: being out of stock with spare parts or not being able to deliver because of the "global" situation should not be an option. If we look at the root causes, some of them are in the engineering and designing of the product. Companies do not consider double sourcing for several reasons:  Poor risk management R&D budget Shortened design cycle  Sometimes lack knowledge and experience in the new generation of engineers.  I remember that 20 years ago, the double "choices" at the components level also for semiconductors were just part of our ...

  Recently the CHF has become stronger than EUR which can cause a big headache to Swiss companies that produce in Switzerland and export to Europe. Having visited a few of them, we can certainly see that we have room for improvement and urge a change of pass in investments to improve their automation. In fact, the only strategy to maintain competitiveness and production in Switzerland is through massive investment in technologies for industry 4.0 to enable improvement in productivity and therefore squeeze the costs. Some technology enablers are machine vision, robotics, cloud, connected edge computing and sensors. Switzerland has a big advantage to have reliable telecommunication infrastructure and some of the big technology players operating in the country, hence it should not be difficult to start the journey of change and keep the competitiveness of the company by avoiding the outsourcing of processes.