Emerging Technologies: Connecting Millennials and Manufacturing

The manufacturing industry is in a state of flux due to both external and internal factors. External causes include pressure to reduce costs due to global competition and shift towards low volume, high mix production due to increasingly diverse customer base who demand autonomy of choice. The biggest internal cause is the retirement of skilled workers with decades of acquired knowledge and the inability to find like-for-like replacements. However new opportunities also arise with every challenge and manufacturing is no exception. There is an unique opportunity now to reshape and optimize all aspects of manufacturing from production, sales and operations planning, logistics and end to end supply chain management. Various technology enablers such as IoT, AI and robotics will have to work in synergy to achieve such optimized manufacturing. This is seen in recent manufacturing initiatives such as Industry 4.0 which are also in alignment with bigger global trends such as the shift towards circular economy, waste reduction and environmental preservation. And this will also attract a new breed or workers, namely the millennial and Gen-Z who will find this new manufacturing more tuned to their ethos, way of thinking and technology preferences which will finally solve the aging worker problem