Trends in Manufacturing That Will Dominate 2020
Manufacturing is being changed day by day because of the rapid development of tech that are changing every aspect of the business. You’ll need to stay on top of these regardless of the size and type of your business.
Some of these will be noticeable right away and others are a part of larger long term changes in the industry and you’ll need to start preparing for them over the years as they require you to change both your team and your assets.
Internet of things
The internet of things isn’t a new phenomenon but it’s becoming more prevalent than ever before because the technology needed for it is getting better. It entails connecting the devices that you use for your day to day work to the existing internet network. This gives you more of a control over your work and allows you to automate it.
At this point manufacturing businesses will invest as much 260 billion in internet of things this year. That will increase their productivity and in the end their revenue in the years to come even if they don’t yet know how the tech will develop.
Predictive maintenance
The biggest cost of having something not functioning in your factory isn’t the repair, but the downtime and the loss of production it creates. That’s why investing in predictive maintenance can save you quite a lot of time overall even if it requires installing new systems right now.
For some companies single hours of down time can mean as much as $100.000 in loss. Using this tech to know when your machines will need to be repaired and taken off the grid, will allow you to make accommodations and prepare for the lost time and income.
From B2B to B2B2C
There used to be a time when your sale approach had one of two options available. You could sell to other businesses or you could sell to customers directly. Now most companies are moving towards the business to business to consumer model. That middle man allows you to focus on production and leave the sales to the experts. Otherwise you would either limit yourself or having to create a whole new set of operations for the customers.
There are a few benefits of this approach:
-It will increase profits
-It will give you a faster time to market
-It provides you with more brand control
-It’s a way to have more price control
Leveraging the supply chain
Supply chain is the key part of your work and you’ll need to find the way to leverage it to your advantage without having to lower prices and get new customers that way. These are some of the ways to do it:
-You’ll need to optimize manufacturing and make it less wasteful
-Logistics also need to be optimized for higher profitability
-Making sure that your sales and operations are as tight as they can be
-Network and inventory should also be optimized on regular basis
Reshoring
Reshoring is the term used lately to describe the process of getting the US companies back to the country. For years now the US companies have been moved abroad to cut costs of manufacturing and this has created social and political problems. The policy is now becoming to bring them back.
There are many issues that this will create on its own mostly in terms of the cost of labor which is much higher in the US. There’s also more regulations and less direct dealing with it. That means that you’ll lose some time and effort on bureaucracy.
Employees
Employees remain to be the most important assets you have as a business owner. That’s something that will become more of an issue as time goes by because the poll of the employees is getting smaller. Beyond that you’ll need to provide the employees with the benefits to keep them motivated and loyal. These go far beyond the cost of their salaries and taxes.
This is something that your competitors will have to deal with as well and that means that everyone will need to up their game over time since they are competing for the same employees.
