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Cyber Attacks in Manufacturing – Here’s How to Protect Your Company
Posted: February 3, 2021Manufacturers are the number one industry target for cyber attacks. Is your product and company data safe? That’s a question you need to ask since the 2020 State of Encrypted Attacks identified manufacturing as the industry most vulnerable to malicious browser breaches. (It found that 38.6% of attacks were targeted at this sector.)
Manufacturing’s unique vulnerability lies in its tendency toward fragmentation and technological obsolescence. Fragmentation refers to the fact that the various facilities of single manufacturers are rarely on the same page. More often than not, each facility is using different systems and IT infrastructures with no coordinated oversight, integrative processes, or policy enforcement between them.
How Predictive Maintenance Makes for Better, Faster, More Cost-Effective Product Development
Posted: January 27, 2021The Fourth Industrial Revolution, or what we know as Industry 4.0, has been barreling down the tracks and picking up speed for more than a decade. But the digital transformation accelerated by COVID-19 has turned the locomotive of Industry 4.0 into a high-speed bullet train. For product developers, deploying the most competitive combination of digital technologies is now the price of entry for the race to success. Among these technologies, predictive maintenance plays an essential yet often underestimated role. Let’s take a deeper dive into how essential this role can be.
Product Managers and the Need for Data, Design, and Complexity Management Experience
Posted: January 21, 2021Product managers have always worn multiple hats to bring together the many pieces of the larger product development puzzle. But as the digital world continues to pick up speed, the role of a product manager is complexifying. Product managers must focus on more than execution and timely delivery, striking an optimal balance between day-to-day product development processes and non-product related tasks.
Top Three Technology and Operations Trends in 2021
Posted: January 7, 2021As companies navigate for market position in 2021, they’ll need to focus on exploiting three rapidly growing trends. Let’s look at how understanding these trends can help your company capitalize on market demand and harness disruptive change to drive growth.
Agile: The Path to Antifragility
Posted: December 30, 2020Nobody needs to be told that 2020 has been a year that will go down as one of the most disruptive, unpredictable, and pivotal in history. In what can reasonably be anticipated as a new normal of unprecedented risk, leaders need a new paradigm for not only withstanding disruptive change but benefitting from it. This new framework may be best understood through the concept of antifragility.
Determining the Best Time to Begin Product Development
Posted: December 23, 2020 While COVID-19 has brought new challenges, it has also opened new market opportunities. This may have left your company wondering if the time is right to move forward with your project development plans. To determine the answer, explore these questions with your team.
Four Supply Chain Disruption Myths Your Company Should Question
Posted: December 9, 2020Pandemic-driven supply chain disruption is a reality that no business can argue. Along with disruption, the pandemic has also spawned myths. If these myths aren't questioned to separate fact from fiction, companies will find it much harder to successfully move forward.
At Pivot International, our reputation for securely leading our clients through disruption continues to grow. Leveraging the power of strategic partnerships, we help clients bring award-winning products to market in exceptionally challenging times.
The Founder’s Trap Has Never Been More Dangerous
Posted: December 2, 2020Management consultant Ichak Adizes first became famous in leadership circles more than twenty-five years ago for his Corporate Lifecycles Model (CLM). This model looks at businesses through a lens that maps stages of growth and decline. It outlines both opportunities and challenges that characterize and accompany each stage.
Why Less Is More in New Product Design
Posted: November 24, 2020Product designers — and, let's face it — all of us often make the mistake of thinking that the more features something has, the better it must be. Whether we're shopping for a new lawnmower, sound system, vehicle, or even a backyard playset for our kids, we tend to think the more options it has, the more it will deliver.
As Leonardo da Vinci said, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." But achieving this kind of simplicity in product development requires two critical competencies.
Three Safeguards for Protecting Your Project from the Dangers of High Resource Utilization
Posted: November 11, 2020At Pivot International, in our collaborative work with clients worldwide, we’ve found that most companies aim to fully utilize their product-development resources. Industry surveys show the average product-development manager attempts to maintain resource utilization above 98%. The logic goes, projects take longer when teams aren’t working 100% of the time, and an organization running on as close to 100% capacity as possible will be faster and more efficient than one that is allocating less of its resources.
