The Future of Manufacturing | An Overview

The Fourth Industrial Revolution keeps moving at a faster and faster pace every day. And that comes, of course, with a lot of opportunities for manufacturing and supply systems, but also with a lot of challenges and requires us to think about the expected but also the unexpected consequences. The real risk here is that we may be shaping the future of manufacturing that works just for a few and it's the responsibility of the global community to make it work for all, both in developed and in developing economies.

Industry is a big contributor to the CO2 emissions worldwide. It's about 30%. And to really make energy savings, you need to know where to start from.

And I think that's the area where there is still acceleration needed. If the company wants to drive this, the CEO has to show the leadership to implement them. Then you need to start to get transparency.

And this means you need to have the team working together. You really need to empower our employees to bring up the ideas and that the different departments like the IT department, is heavily working together with the manufacturing department to make it work. If you look at what we do today, in many industries, you use technologies like automation, intelligent systems to make products, but there are a lot of gaps.

The gaps could be inventory, the waste and also quality issues. Those are common. So I think the future of manufacturing will be how these gaps can be physically reduced or removed.

That can make manufacturing even more attractive for young people. And also it's a very meaningful for the future. It is about that human and automation interaction, making sure we have the skills that we need for what's coming at us for the future.

We can't automate everything all at once, nor do we want to. So it's about making the thoughtful choices where technology really makes a difference, improves resilience, reduces risk, reduces our costs so they can be passed on to our customers. And it's very important that from the beginning, employees in their spaces are involved in the design of that technology.

Digital tools are the next level. It unlocks a whole new set of opportunities with more insight and more real time insight than ever before. The next phase of this, and we're starting to see this in some of the lighthouse companies already, is to operate with these capabilities, not just to improve the performance of an individual site or individual product supply chain, but to impact the performance of an entire enterprise globally and even more exciting of an entire ecosystem.

That is creating more academic inclusion, a better, brighter future, and really changing even how we think about what a manufacturing job is. Governments during this time feel that they have a responsibility to provide good jobs for their citizens. It is also important that governments ensure that workers have the right skills that they need to pick up the kind of jobs that a highly productive, highly technologically enabled and automated and are suitable for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

This can actually benefit the world community as a whole. The future of manufacturing is not about one company, one government, one country. It's about bringing the global community together to fix some of the global challenges that we are all facing.