The answer might surprise you.
Technology is the single greatest manufacturing’s challenge (and opportunity)… or is it?
By Nico Thomas for Industry Week
photo: istock/Getty Images
It’s true that technology has evolved and changed how manufacturers—especially small and medium-sized manufacturers—operate their businesses, in ways that even a few years ago didn’t seem possible.
The physical and cyberbased systems that run today’s factories and supply chains are increasingly interconnected through advanced networking and computing technologies that enable products and production capabilities to far exceed what was available in previous generations. And manufacturing’s digitization is only going to increase.
But a recent survey shows us that technology-related challenges aren’t what keep business owners awake at night—it’s who will do the work and how to train them.
For the past 10 years, the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) National Network has annually surveyed thousands of its U.S. manufacturing clients to identify the top manufacturing’s challenges these companies will face over the next three years. This data is a pulse check on manufacturing and helps us better understand what is critically important to business owners and CEOs. Understanding the business and economic factors that influence companies can help the Network prepare for a new decade of supporting the U.S. manufacturing industry.
Employee recruitment and retention are a glaring outlier in our data. Manufacturing companies’ CEOs and owners are increasingly concerned about the future of their workforce. MEP clients reporting this as a challenge has more than doubled, and it is now the second most frequently reported challenge companies report facing.
