Columnist

Manufacturing needs context, not more software

I started my career at a small manufacturer in Oxfordshire building precision parts for aerospace and automotive customers. 

The work was world-class; the people were razor-sharp. 

But the systems? Pure chaos.

It was like trying to conduct a symphony with half the orchestra in another postcode.

Every day began the same way: open the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), chase the latest work order and then spend half the morning reconciling a spreadsheet that hadn’t been updated in weeks. 

By lunch, someone would ask for a report stored in another system, and the one person with access would be on holiday in Zanzibar. 

I’ve lost count of the hours of my life lost to spreadsheets.

At Mithryl, we wanted to understand how widespread these issues really are. 

Our new nationwide survey of 1000 UK manufacturing workers shows this experience is far from unique. 

More than nine in ten respondents said a significant chunk of their day is spent on tasks that could have been avoided. 

Nearly half find those tasks demotivating, and one in four say it makes them want to find another job.

This isn’t about lack of effort; it’s about lack of context. 

Workers can’t find what they need, when they need it. 

Indeed, 44 per cent say they struggle to locate the right ‘how-to’, and the same number say their company is riddled with data and expertise silos. 

As experienced colleagues retire, half of workers worry vital know-how will disappear with them.

These are small frictions that add up to a major drag on productivity. 

Time lost searching for information, re-typing data and sitting in unnecessary meetings doesn’t show up in profit-and-loss sheets, but it quietly erodes competitiveness.

How to fix it

Cut the repetition

Automate the routine jobs like report exports, manual data entry and re-typing information that already exists elsewhere.

Bring everything home

Create a single digital hub where documents actually live: SOPs, inspection sheets, maintenance logs, supplier certs, work orders, key emails. 

Make it searchable, linkable, and accessible.

Organise for clarity

Use clear, human-readable categories to organise your information. 

These categories form the structure that turns messy data into something teams can easily explore and understand.

Connect the labels with meaning

A machine links to the activity that changed it, the document that proves it, the material involved and the process where results show up. 

This transforms isolated facts from what happened to insights about why it happened.

The best way to make this possible is through a knowledge graph; it is like a connected map that links your machines, materials, documents, people and processes in one place. 

Give artificial intelligence something worth knowing

Generic chatbots often fall short in factory settings because they lack understanding of what your data means. 

Feed them this knowledge graph structure and they’ll start reasoning properly, helping you to spot risks, surface trends and suggest actions that make sense.

The reward for this hard work is felt across every process, from quality to logistics. 

Teams make decisions faster, audits get easier and engineers spend time solving problems instead of hunting for them.

British manufacturing doesn’t lack ambition; it lacks integration. 

Fix that, and productivity will follow.

Roger Zouein is founder and chief executive of industrial data platform Mithryl

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