Lord Bhattacharayya was scheduled to make yesterday’s Lord Austin Lecture on the theme of The Challenges of the 21st Century: Revolutions in Global Markets, Regulation and Customisation.

In his synopsis he notes three challenges facing manufacturers:

• The scale of global markets means that corporations will have to be more flexible while providing total quality in manufacturing and processes and increasing R&D spend. Time-to-market will become increasingly critical.
• Manufacturers will be faced with differing needs from different societies responding to global warming and safety in different ways.
• Increasing technological sophistication and consumer purchasing power will lead to increasing demands for more tailored products.

The lecture was at the 3rd IET Automotive Electronics Conference where I was yesterday to give a talk on Automotive Variant Management - more on this later…