JANUARY 2016MANUFACTURINGTECHINSIGHTS.COM9they need to be integrated seamlessly into the fabric.Materials integrated into fabrics include optical fibers, RFID tags that can be sewn into fabrics, conductive polymers and solar cells to harvest solar energy. Use cases for smart textiles, also known as e-textiles include health monitoring of vital signs, sports training data acquisi-tion, tracking the position and status of personnel or soldiers, monitoring pilot or truck driver fatigue.In addition to product development which is the core business of a textile manufacturing company, companies also need service innovation in order to provide additional value for the customers and gain competitive advantage. Service innovation's main compo-nents are; to clearly define the service components provided around the product, to assess their value for each customer segment, to redesign and improve the pro-cess as necessary and to make this value clearly visible to customers. Technology is one of the key drivers for this process as well. Especially in B2B manufacturing companies, including textile manufactur-ing, service innovation is a very critical capability in order to avoid commoditiza-tion of products.Technology trends such as mobility, social media and cloud computing are they key enablers for service innovations. Most of the B2B companies especially in industrial textiles industry are transform-ing into B2B2C companies by providing services to the customers of custom-ers. Some examples of such technology driven services are:· Providing user friendly, mobile tools for customers' staff in order to become easier to do business with in terms of order management, complaint management,reports for past transactions etc.· Providing training opportunities for customers' staff via e-learning platforms.· Developing joint projects via online project management and enterprise social platforms· Managing the finished product inventory at the customer sites with pre-defined and integrated auto-replenishment processes.While working on these new service and product devel-opments, companies usually end up improving or fine tuning the relevant products or internal processes as a result of reviewing the process from a new perspective.Continuous Improvement of Internal ProcessesAll manufacturing companies should pur-sue continuous improvement initiatives that aim to improve the core business pro-cesses. Even though the technologies used in the back office areas are pretty mature, new technology trends can help compa-nies improve these processes. There are plenty of improvement opportunities with the use of latest trends such as;· Migration of internal IT services to cloud based platforms in order to reap the benefits of cloud computing with cost, capacity and resource optimization.· Utilization of an online enterprise social platform to improve collaboration within the organization.· Development of a corporate applica-tion store front with internal mobile appli-cations that help improve the productivity of internal staff.· Utilization of in-memory computing platforms in order to improve analyzing capabilties of real-time data in very large volumes.· Seemless integration of all internal systems and services so that singularity and accuracy of data is provided and end-to-end tracebility is possible.· Introduction of mobile technologies to the shopfloor environment to enable the employees at the production area to be mobile rather than being stationed in front of a terminal.· Development of a shared, mobile, cloud based and secure platform which is integrated with CRM systems to support the commercial and market in-telligence activities with historical and current customer data and notes.All the con-tinuous improvement initiatives need to be aligned with corporate strategies and priorities and governed under project portfolio management. In conclusion, all of the latest tech-nology trends provide opportunities to improve today's processes and services as well as to enable transformation of business plans and processes for a more agile and volatile tomorrow. One of the key success factors for any CIO remains to be the alignment of all these new opportunities with corpo-rate strategies and to lead the IT organi-zations not as a support function but as a driver function that enables transforma-tion and innovation in the company. New technologies not only enable new products and capabilities for value creation and competitive advantage, but also offer great opportunities to transform legacy systems
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