Role of a production manager in twenty years time

Role of Production Manager in 20 Years Time

One of the most pivotal roles to the transformation of manufacturing globally will be that illustrated in the emergence of Production Managers as the focal point of how companies will become more centered on responding to global customer demand. Today and in the past, Production Managers have often become experts at defining their contributions to companies by excelling at making their contributions measured by Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that were internally focused. In the future however Production Managers will be just as adept at analytics and reporting as they will be in creating strategies for re-aligning business processes to business objectives. The extensive work of Davenport (1992) illustrates this point, including the definition of a five-step approach to the defining business process re-engineering and development.

The Production Manager of the future will be equally adept at analytics that measure productions' contribution to customer satisfaction, profitability and lifetime customer value in addition to the reduction in inventories and other key internal measures of performance. Taking this focus further, Production Managers will also be very adept at redefining business processes and then selectively applying technologies to automate them. The role of Production Manager as just as critical to business strategies that impact customers as they are to managing production and manufacturing today is the transition already in progress.

More Demand Driven, Less Governed By Internal Metrics

In keeping with a greater agility at analytics and a skill set specifically aimed at business process definition, management, and the re-defining business processes, Production Managers will also be increasingly expected to synchronize the many suppliers on the one hand and the many demands from customers on the other. This synchronization of demand with both suppliers and customers is already quite complex, yet in 20 years it will be even more so. As a result, the Production Manager of 20 years from now will need to have a solid grounding in information systems technologies and the role of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and their role in making global manufacturing as efficient as possible. The objective of these efforts is to stabilize manufacturers' pricing structures so they don't need to move production plants around the globe, constantly chasing the lowest cost per labor hour. Instead the ability to be more efficient at sensing and responding to demand is where the future of Production Managers will be able to make their greatest contribution. According to AMR Research (2004) the concept of the demand-driven supply network (what this research firm calls DDSN) exemplifies the role of the Production Manager as the critical point in making supply chains as competitive as possible.

Production Manager as Change Agent