My 3 Key Take-Aways from the 2017 Best Practices for Automotive Event

Before I get into my 3 take-aways, I want to thank everyone who attended this year’s forum (Sept 18-20). It was great to see so many friends and those who had attended our previous two forums.  It was also great to see so many first-time attendees. The 2017 forum was so far the best in many respects.

Secondly, I want to thank Eventful Conferences for their work in handling so much of the heavy lifting that goes along with planning, coordinating and managing an event of this magnitude. I appreciate their attention to detail and professionalism that comes along with managing conference events like this on a full-time basis.

And as promised, I would like to briefly provide the three key messages or themes, from my perspective, that were key take-aways from this 3-day conference:

Business Transformation – It’s real. This year’s presentations, mostly delivered by customer practitioners, were real stories about how innovative automotive OEMs and suppliers are using new technologies and applications to improve their businesses, address real problems, and capitalize on real business opportunities. Some of these stories were focused in internal process improvements while others were very focused on creating competitive differentiation.

The New “Real-Time” – Automotive companies are reengineering daily business processes across their organizations to turn operational data instantly into immediate information and insight. These new approaches to management are being applied on the shop floor, in supply chain management, in customer service, and so on to help minimize costs, improve customer demand responsiveness, improve product quality, along with many other benefits. A key message of my keynote presentation was the conversion of operational employees from reactive “fire fighters” to analysts who proactively monitor their systems and maintain an environment of high-quality data necessary for process integrity.

Innovation Today – The good news is that innovative people in innovative companies have the opportunity to address today’s business problems with innovative solutions; with technologies that were not readily available or consumable just a few years ago. Some of the discussed examples would be classified as relatively quick “low-hanging fruit” types of ideas, while other examples would certainly qualify as major business transformation initiatives. In other words, the underlying technological foundation provides the ability to experiment and create entirely new, potentially disruptive, business processes, while also enabling continuous improvement in today’s competitive business landscape.

It is hard to believe that we have already begun the review of this year’s event for the purposes of planning and improving the 2018 Best Practices for Automotive event. As always, we welcome any input from our customers and partners regarding how to make future events even better. For many of you, I will likely see you soon. For others, I will see you later.  :-)

/Chet  ([email protected])