So That Happened: Reshoring Spending Continues, Despite Manufacturing Slowdown
Technology Survey Says Tech Isn’t the Issue
Manufacturers are still tackling the exact same problems that plagued them prior to the Industrial Revolution.
A new survey, “The State of Technology in the Manufacturing Industry,” conducted in June 2024 by the ABI Research consulting firm, included feedback from 461 manufacturing leaders from in the Germany, Malaysia and the United States. Half of the top 10 concerns relate to workforce, not tech, with recruitment and retention cited as the top two people-focused problems.
Respondents also overwhelmingly felt that the next five years will bring more technology change to manufacturing than in the previous decade.
More than 75% of respondents felt cloud technology will foster real-time collaboration across the entire supply chain and enable remote monitoring of manufacturing facilities from pretty much anywhere on the planet.
A majority of respondents from Germany and Malaysia (62% and 60%) felt that cloud solutions boost manufacturing efficiency versus only 49% of U.S. manufacturers.
Companies such as John Deere are still way ahead of the game when it comes to 5G deployment, according to the report.
- 44% of responding companies are only in the initial rollouts of enterprise 4G
- 75% are still figuring out how to implement 5G and/or evaluating suppliers
- 74% of manufacturers say private cellular increases security of manufacturing data
Regarding cybersecurity, manufacturers in Malaysia and the U.S. agreed that vulnerabilities new technologies like AI, cloud computing and robotics pose the greatest cybersecurity risks. The survey lumps 5G into “new tech” which seems to conflict with the previous statements about private cellular and added security. German manufacturers worry more about data breaches and theft than new tech vulnerabilities.
The survey sheds more light on what practical use cases we might see for the much-hyped generative AI (GenAI) technology. More than three-quarters (78%) of respondents think GenAI’s most common use case will be identifying the root of production issues. Slightly fewer believe GenAI will enable the faster creation of work instructions.
There’s still (in my opinion way too much) faith the industrial metaverse might play a role in manufacturing. In Malaysia, 83% of respondents, in Germany 82% and in the U.S. 73% feel the metaverse can aid in new product development. Note: not “will” aid in new product development but “can” aid.
U.S. companies cited staff training and upskilling as the top use case for the industrial metaverse. Replace the buzzword with “virtual/augmented/mixed reality” (XR) and this is precisely what I’m seeing from live deployments.
On the IT/OT divide, only 39% of respondents feel those teams collaborate effectively. So, all’s well in that continuing debate…
—Dennis Scimeca