Q&A with Accenture's John Ferreira

John Ferreira is the managing director for Accenture's Management Consulting Manufacturing Practice in North America. Consulting sat down with him to discuss the state of manufacturing right now.

Consulting: What are some of the most important forces driving change in the manufacturing sector (in North America)? Ferreira: Manufacturing is at a new inflection point. Manufacturing's traditional focus on cost efficiency and quality has become table stakes; the real opportunity now is for the manufacturing function to enable revenue growth and competitive advantage by driving operationally excellent capabilities that the marketing, sales and new product teams can exploit—that is, aligning manufacturing capabilities to drive customer specific value creation.

Increasingly, top performing manufacturing functions are being called upon to play an equal role in driving the growth agenda; they are being asked to become much more flexible in a world of uncertain demand and highly volatile inputs; they are being asked to dramatically speedup their customer response times, to substantially increase their ability to supply unique, customer-specific products and services as well as improve their visibility and control over a global eco-system of partners and suppliers who are co-equals with them in providing critical elements of the value-added in their products. Taken together, all of this represents a significant paradigm shift that will drive significant change in the sector over the foreseeable future. Consulting: What are three or four of the most important challenges manufacturing companies currently confront?