By: Humberto Ballesteros, DGP’s Commercial Director for Latin America.
The manufacturing industry is a vital activity as its contribution to GDP, employment and tax collection form one of the basic pillars of the economy. According to a National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI) report, by the end of 2022, the industry has grown by 2.68% over the previous year, creating direct employment for nearly 1.5 million people in the country.
This relevance to the national economy makes companies in this sector stay on the path of innovation. The pace of change is relentless, and manufacturing companies are under increasing pressure to keep up. Without a truly connected operation, the organization cannot use innovation to achieve its true potential.
Accordingly Gardner®, “Manufacturing CIOs’ priorities have shifted due to pandemic recovery, socio-economic uncertainties and supply chain shortages. While this may be viewed as a negative for companies, they have a great opportunity to create new sources of income not seen since the Industrial Revolution.
The manufacturing industry is changing rapidly. However, manufacturers are under more pressure as they deal with legacy infrastructure that is not cloud-native and act in real-time based on data.
Today, manufacturing is driven by new industry trends such as automation and sustainability goals. By modernizing their operations, companies can see the latest data about their operations to help them make strategic business decisions.
In all industries studied Digibee Business Integration Status Report, manufacturing is highly dependent on the IT team for the integration process. Once deciding to implement an integration strategy, most industry respondents plan to use internal resources supported by an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) provider to manage the project. This deployment model reduces reliance on already in-house resources while reducing costs for external consultants and professional service providers.
For manufacturing companies that have not yet implemented an iPaaS solution, the lack of native non-cloud technology has become a problem. More than half of respondents from manufacturing companies report that they need to reconfigure up to 10 integrations for core business applications every 12 months, the highest ranking of any industry surveyed.
These business interruptions due to unnecessary maintenance cycles are time-consuming and costly, negatively impacting profitability and operational efficiency.
Improving safety, reliability and manageability were key objectives for manufacturing companies in the DGP report. This is due to the challenge of securing growing networks of connected devices that generate significant amounts of data.
With so much data, it’s no surprise that respondents ranked “Improve business analytics and decision-making” second on the list of goals. Enterprise integration helps integrate data from different applications across the entire process, streamlining access and analysis. Manufacturers take advantage of these valuable data stores to support and help businesses. With a solid digital foundation, manufacturing companies can take advantage of new innovations, which is reflected in Goal Number Three: Enable Automation and AI.
When it comes to challenges, when implementing an integration platform, industry respondents rank security as their top challenge, as security concerns increase as the amount of data collected and stored increases.
Legacy systems ranked second on the list of challenges, a reflection of cloud-native technologies being ingrained within the operation. Additionally, it causes an ever-growing list of IT backlogs. Once deployed, an iPaaS platform quickly resolves these delays, freeing IT teams to focus on the future.
60% of pending IT projects in manufacturing companies require integration, so the majority of respondents (74%) rely on such technology to solve backlogged IT projects.
As long as manufacturing companies adapt and modernize their operations, they will continue to be the backbone of our nation’s economy and employment.
