Focus on India

36 respondents were from India. The fact that manufacturers in India are highly focused on innovation is not surprising. As domestic competition increases and prices start to come under pressure, many in India recognize that they will need to innovate in order to protect their margins and attract premium prices for their products. This, in turn, is driving India's manufacturers to quickly start embracing high-tech and advanced manufacturing technologies.

However, it is clear that - in India and in the rest of the world - manufacturers could be gaining much more value from data and analytics (D&A), particularly on the supply chain side. Indeed, we believe that those manufacturers able to leverage their customer-facing D&A experience and capabilities to improve their supply chain operations will ultimately win in the marketplace.

India is clearly changing. And new consumer pressures, new market reforms, new competitors and new innovations are starting to help elevate the market from being a ‘low-cost' manufacturing destination into a ‘high-value' and ‘high-quality' destination instead.

While this will clearly provide significant dividends for India's manufacturing ecosystem, it will also mean that manufacturers will need to keep a close eye on their costs if they hope to remain competitive in one of the world's fastest-growing marketplaces.

"Manufacturers will need to start focusing their data and analytics capabilities towards analyzing, understanding and improving their supply chain operations," says S.V. Sukumar, Head of Strategy & Operations and Industrial Manufacturing, KPMG in India.

"Along with improved analytics, we believe that greater collaboration across the supply chain, improved visibility and enhanced integration can help manufacturers overcome some of these challenges."
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