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Increasingly companies are
attaching greater importance to the need to differentiate their
product and service offerings in order to remain competitive.
Typically, firms are:
- adding new technologies to
their products to differentiate;
- forming alliances with their
customers;
- adding service features to
their manufactured product offerings;
- reducing time to market for
new products;
- reducing the number of suppliers
and forming longer-term relationships and alliances with those
that remain;
- expanding their product range;
and
- reducing their cost base to
become the lowest cost producer.
Rapid prototyping technologies
have the potential to contribute something to the achievement
of most, if not all these actions. How this is so is described
in more detail in Chapter 3 of the Management Report.
When addressing rapid prototyping
technologies, seven major strategic issues need to be explored
(see the Management Report
for more details):
- the strategic nature of the
technologies - aspects of rapid prototyping which take investment
decisions beyond the realm of short-term return on investment
calculations;
- the technologies as enablers
of new strategies - the new business and marketing strategies
that can be pursued as a result of using these technologies;
- the impact of rapid prototyping
on the achievement of business objectives - the specific business
objectives that can be directly affected by applying the technologies;
- strategic aspects of organisational
and cultural changes - what organisational and culture changes
does the business strategy itself demand;
- development of change competencies
- applying rapid prototyping technologies to achieve operational
change competency, and developing tactical and strategic change
competencies to enable continuing developments in rapid prototyping
to be deployed to satisfy existing business objectives and to
develop new strategies;
- development and exploitation
of knowledge - using existing knowledge and developing new knowledge
for competitive advantage.
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