Manufacturing Product Change Notification (PCN) Features for AI and SaaS Product Managers

The feature is the product. Asking the right questions helps PCN product teams identify solutions that meet manufacturer expectations.

Good product managers understand target market needs and can communicate those requirements to technical engineers in house who then build solutions. According to Brian Chesky, cofounder and CEO of Airbnb, building simple solutions that solve problems that are overlooked and need to be solved is how services gain adoption to help companies become successful.

For AI and SaaS teams, know you can apply this thinking to any industry, including electronics manufacturing.

You want to deliver your solution to the market as informally as possible, beginning with a very crude version. Your minimum viable product (MVP).

Chesky emphasizes that your MVP is then followed by "rapid iterations" so you continue to achieve customer satisfaction.

As an example, a big problem I see few vendors able to solve in electronics manufacturing industry is effective product change notice (PCN) management.

For AI and SaaS vendors it starts with knowing the feature(s) is the product.

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For example, there are a number of ways to get data from PDFs, but are you getting the right data? If so, is the data in a specific or useable format to produce different outputs that different users can then use?

Manufacturers know supply chain careers can implode because their PCN routine is not a priority. Manufacturers want to know can it do this? Can it do that?

For AI and SaaS product teams targeting manufacturing industry, knowing who owns the bill-of-materials and what problems they face is important.

Are buyers buying against authorized an AVL? How are manufacturers protected against a wrong component being placed in the wrong product version? These things happen and cost manufacturers millions. Even billions.

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Savvy AI and SaaS project managers building manufacturing and supply chain applications will focus on developing good product sense and identifying useful product features and functions for market adoption.

Having an ability to identify useful industry data and knowing how to apply it for better product and company decision-making can give AI and SaaS companies valuable insights to build out product offerings.

Developing skills creating presentations and presenting to different supply chain groups and audiences is also important.

What manufacturers want is to be able to take any data format, from any manufacturer or vendor or supplier, and be able to easily tell what changed and where.

For electronics equipment OEM manufacturers formulating EMS manufacturing strategy you want to be notified before your RFQ process so your teams are working with updated libraries.

Predictive (active) PCN management is ideal. It tells supply chain managers what changed and where, but today the vast majority of PCN services available to manufacturers are passive. You have to go in and find where the change is taking place in your supply chain.