Member Article

The need to adapt: Leveraging AI in manufacturing

While manufacturing as a whole has seen some great years, manufacturers continue to face unprecedented challenges.

Brexit is now official and manufacturers continue to suffer amidst ongoing uncertainty, tariffs, skills shortages and market volatility. It’s only the start of many negotiations surrounding trade deals and regulations which will only further add to this ongoing volatile environment for manufacturers who increasingly trade across many different borders. These factors are putting immense pressure on manufacturers’ key goals for growth, revenue and profitability.

Transform or die

“Transform or die” has become the rallying cry of industry analysts and manufacturing leaders alike. Digital transformation is still a top priority yet manufacturing and technology leaders both face the same problem: where to focus to achieve their revenue growth. Unfortunately, manufacturers tend to focus on traditional areas of their business as they have always done, such as cost savings and production efficiencies which are also getting increasingly complex.

Static strategy

Unfortunately, while manufacturers work in a dynamic industry, most digital strategies are static. They help companies address whatever their current pain points are, but they don’t scale to keep pace with business growth and the evolving expectations of customers, distributors, and dealers. True Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral foundation of the most successful examples of manufacturers digitising their business; particularly when focused on the areas that have the most dramatic improvement both in revenue and growth.

The primary example is a manufacturer’s end-to-end sales process. The digital transformation of the sales process, from product design, delivery, and pricing, all the way through to enabling the customer to more easily gain long term value, will have the greatest impact on the business. By improving revenue and market share, it will far more effectively defend against disruption of the market by competitors, offering a critical first-mover advantage to the manufacturer that can master the sales the fastest.

Leveraging AI

Several recent research sources are uncovering a worrying trend that manufacturers are struggling to leverage AI due to the lack of data infrastructure. While this may certainly be true, manufacturers are some of the most data-rich organisations in business. With the rapid expansion and adoption of connected products (the Industrial Internet of Things), manufacturers have more data on their product usage and customers than ever before. It’s not the lack of data that’s the challenge, it’s the lack of actionable business insight from this data that is causing the issue.

There are some key actions that manufacturers can (and should) take now to gain insight and drive growth:

• Manufacturers should ensure they leverage external expertise from experienced vendors with a proven history of helping manufacturers apply AI in this focused area of the end-to-end sales process. Prioritising this process will result in the most immediate gains.
• The application of AI should be directly linked to a business strategy e.g. revenue growth, productivity and profitability.
• Manufacturers must make sure they have buy-in and alignment from all the stake holding functions of their business relating to the end-to-end sales process across all channels including distributors, dealers and customers. To provide structure, it will help to set simple goals with a short timescale for achieving results – do not think years, think months or weeks

Manufacturers leverage of available AI technology is not faltering due to a lack of data but perhaps a lack of direction and support from within the business. Manufacturers should be investing in AI, but they should be using it to deliver the sales experience the modern buyer is demanding. Given the recent downturn in fortunes and continuing uncertainty for the manufacturing industry, these can be simple and fast ways for manufacturers to apply AI and provide direct value.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Richard Blatcher .