Mark Francis, Sales and Marketing Manager, ECM

Great opportunities are coming in 2013, as electronics permeates further in to automotive, energy, medical, and consumer products such as flexible hand-sets. It will however, be a year of winners and losers; those who are prepared and those who are not.

Holding back the industry is the old "clockwork technology" based on long term sales forecasts. With the point of sale rapidly transitioning to the internet, the real demand "pull signal" from the customer is hitting manufacturing directly. Cost saving in distribution is great, but brings pressure to manufacturing to be agile, keeping pace with continuously changing demand.

Technologies and flows will fundamentally change, not just improve. High mix is more
difficult, but known -- whereas the pull demand is unknown anything, unknown any time.

"Just In Time" materials logistics driven by direct machine consumption signals is a
critical element, together with dynamic production planning to achieve true agility.

We also see need for multi-platform engineering tools, the ability to execute high
mix over multiple platforms at the performance of high volume.

Agility and complete traceability will be elements crucial to success in 2013. The Mentor
Graphics Valor MSS manufacturing execution software suite offers an industry-unique method of satisfying these challenging requirements.