The Future of Digital Transformation

Challenges and Threats Facing Manufacturing industry in 2022

A major challenge over the last two decades has been the lack of genuine productivity growth in manufacturing. The gains in labour productivity due to increased capital intensity have been offset by the cost of that capital investment. This has meant that multi-factor productivity has barely moved. Limiting the aspiration of investment to labour savings, a purely financially driven perspective, is a mistake. It overlooks the opportunity for manufacturers to be truly innovative, find new business opportunities and adopt new business models.

The question I often ask is:

• Can Australia rebuild a culture that values manufacturing?
• Can we rebuild a community of industrialists — owners and executives — who have a passion for making things, rather than taking things?
• Is it possible for publicly owned companies to make the long-term investments in technology, innovation, skills and expertise that are typical of the large privately held Mittelstand in Germany?
• And what is the cost of the loss of engineering expertise from public boards? Has it created an unsustainable focus on finance and risk rather than wealth creation?

Impact of COVID-19 and Business Strategies for 2022

As digital transformation enablers we have been able to do most of what we normally do, working from home. Most of our customers have continued operations and permit us to work on-site, when necessary.

Remote access has been important, but in most cases was already in place. Commissioning from home rather than on-site has been the most difficult challenge — nothing is as good as being ‘on the spot’.

There is no doubt, however, that there are limits to working from home. There is a significant impact on the sense of being a team and the effectiveness and fluidity of collaboration. This is essential to quality engineering and innovation.

Post-COVID-19 and The ‘New Normal’

As we move to COVID-normal we will continue to refine our remote working processes. We have created regular online gatherings of smaller teams that allow for unstructured interaction. This provides an aspect of sharing excitement at what’s happening in our lives, what challenges are troubling us in our work, and how we can support each other.

Although we will return to the office, we have all come to better appreciate the potential for loneliness and abandonment that people working from home may feel. Our mental health and motivation are priorities. Therefore, we look to come out of the other side of the pandemic as an organisation that communicates better than it did and supports every team member well.

Developments in Artificial Intelligence in Advanced Manufacturing

AI is certainly starting to make an impact amongst ATS Global customers. The challenge we see with AI is one of confidence in what it produces. It is that it is often difficult to understand how the AI makes its decision and difficult to build confidence that the decision is reliable.

ATS is collaborating with Rulex, which has developed Explainable Artificial Intelligence that makes room for creativity, human knowledge and collaboration. I expect that artificial intelligence that is explainable and behaves like a member of a team will begin to win more confidence in the core technology and improve adoption.

For our business there are applications in supply chain activities like scheduling, in process performance optimisation, and in general manufacturing decision support that we have already seen produce substantially performance improvements.

This article first appeared on processonline.com.