Manufacturers therefore need tools that help their workers collaborate and stay connected across geographies and functions.
Many experts predictedthat with the coming of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), automation and advanced technologies would rapidly displace factory jobs and workers world-wide.Thus far, this prediction has not panned out. In fact, our research with the World Economic Forum (WEF) reveals that leading factories (“Lighthouses”) have invested significantly in people. And the importance of people has only intensified as the COVID-19 pandemic has swept across the globe.The need to augment workers with technology stems in part from four major trends that are transforming the manufacturing landscape: retiring baby boomers, regionalization, the proliferation of shop-floor data, and now COVID-19. These forces are creating a workforce that is more spread out, less experienced, and more overwhelmed by data with untapped potential.
Manufacturers therefore need tools that help their workers collaborate and stay connected across geographies and functions—particularly as physical distancing and tighter employee-safety measures take hold. Digital collaboration tools are primed to play a critical role in enabling workers to tap into the collective knowledge of the enterprise, solve problems with experts remotely, and turn internet of things (IoT) data from the shop floor into lasting value. We estimate that digital collaboration has the potential to unlock more than $100 billion in value—thanks in part to productivity boosts of 20 to 30 percent in collaboration-intensive work processes such as root cause investigation, supplier management, and maintenance.
The manufacturing landscape is changing, An aging workforce, regionalization, and data proliferation are changing the composition of the manufacturing labor force and how work gets done—with the COVID-19 outbreak compounding some of the effects. As a result, manufacturers face an urgent imperative to help less experienced workers build knowledge and capabilities, and take advantage of data through collaboration.Aging workforce. In 2019, The United States-based National Association of Manufacturers estimated that one-quarter of the US manufacturing workforce was age 55 or older. It comes as no surprise, then, that one of the biggest concerns among US manufacturers has been “brain drain,” with 97 percent of firms having expressed some concern. To prevent this loss of institutional knowledge as aging workers retire, manufacturers have intensified efforts to codify knowledge, so that they can pass on more efficiently and effectively to the next generation of employees.
At the same time, manufacturers have also reported difficulty in recruiting and retaining qualified workers, with recent college graduates seeming more inclined to work in businesses that were more obviously digitally oriented. Whether the very different economic conditions businesses and workers now confront will make a sustained difference in hiring is unclear. Yet the fact remains that these young workers neither share the same skillset as previous generations, nor have they been exposed to the same training and apprenticeship programs. Manufacturers can start to appeal to this new generation of workers by making it easier to train and help them learn. Collaboration tools allow factories to better leverage their experts across a broader group of people to help train the less experienced workforce.
Regionalization. Over the past several years, traditional offshore factory zones were becoming less attractive as transportation costs and labor rates continued to rise. In response, manufacturers were already beginning to relocate factories, either “nextshoring” to be close to the customer in developed markets or shifting to other regions, such as the MINT countries (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey). If, as appears possible in response to the pandemic, regionalization continues to disperse the workforce and alter the factory footprint, manufacturers will need new and improved ways to share learnings across geographical boundaries.Data proliferation. Within the past decade, machine connectivity in factories has grown exponentially, generating vast amounts of new and enriched data. But many manufacturers have been challenged to help their workers use the data to maximum effect in solving problems and making better decisions. Tools that connect workers both to other workers and to data will help manufacturers turn the data into actions that generate real value: Imagine an operator who wants to troubleshoot a a piece of equipment, and can share real-time machine data with a remote expert to get precise guidance.
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