Three Forces that will Shape Manufacturing’s Post-Pandemic Future

In this new remote era, threats around cybersecurity have continued to grow, both at individual and business levels. We’ve been supporting customers with a defence-in-depth approach that begins by assessing the resilience of end devices, looking across the network to make sure that proper segmentation is used, and importantly that data is protected.

Being Agile to What the Market Wants, Today and Tomorrow

An important lesson from the past 18 months has been that the leading manufacturers of tomorrow will be those we can’t put in a box. As flexibility becomes a priority from the shop floor to each end of the supply chain, leaders need to be thinking at a deeper level about how their business can be built for change.

‘Impressive’ doesn’t begin to convey the magnitude of the achievement we witnessed at the height of the pandemic period. Factories were able to move with speed and to retrofit, in some cases, entire plants to produce what was most needed. For examples, you need look no further than IMA Group and Teknoweb Converting in Italy or Irish Distillers. Not only did they deliver, but they did so quickly, accurately and at viable price points. This would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

This victory provided us with a glimpse of what the manufacturing operations of tomorrow looks like – complete agility in response to changing market demand. Shifting operational requirements, changing buyer wants and behaviours, and the need for rapid innovation are all forces that will encourage the sector to have flexibility embedded into the foundations of areas like product development, production and supply chain.

Being Best Stewards of a Sustainable Future for Manufacturing

No manufacturer can hide from the fact that our sector is critical in leading sustainable change. The growth and scale of global manufacturing is such that we make a substantial impact in areas that are critical for the future of humanity – energy, water and waste. It’s now up to us whether that impact is positive or negative.

The question is how we make sustainability central to what we do. At Rockwell Automation we’re living up to our own sustainability promise.  

We’re committed to becoming carbon neutral and we have assigned a sustainability officer with a dedicated team to support this cause. We think that it’s important to have a bold target and hold every level of our business accountable to those aims. 

It’s also not only about our own carbon-neutral ambitions, but about making sure our ecosystem of suppliers and partners all match our ambitions. Our recent work with Sustainder and Technologies Added in the Netherlands is just one example of this in practice.

Reducing energy inputs, improving the reliability of equipment and increasing the circularity of industrial equipment through recycling are all things that are well within our control. Digital technology can support progress in sustainability, such as the use of analytics for better management of energy inputs to identify opportunities for improved efficiency. We’re also assisting customers in the use of preventative maintenance to reduce the risk of downtime and increase the overall reliability of equipment.

Seeking Answers in Digital

Digitalisation alone doesn’t solve these three areas – it’s human ingenuity and intrepidness that brings progress. What digital technologies can do is provide the visibility, control and scale for us to take on these challenges with confidence and conviction. These technologies enable us to work collaboratively within an ecosystem of similarly progressive and ethically minded companies to achieve mutual goals.

The experience of the 2020s so far is that volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity are all here to stay – we can’t avoid these forces, so let’s embrace them. By being resilient, agile and sustainability-focused in how we approach these challenges, we can leverage the technologies available to survive and thrive in a changing global landscape.