Manufacturing Leadership Journal

versation among a large number of people using the power of a net work.

In business, too, our expectations about the speed and pace of change are undergoing a transformation. We want real-time information about operations and supply chains. We want a greater understanding of consumer buying habits. We expect to be able to do business faster, more efficiently, and to be able to satisfy individual requirements more completely than ever before.

Driven by advancements in information technology and communications, our expectations about business change have clearly been re-set, at least on a conceptual level. In manufacturing, we can see the promised land of Manufacturing 4.0

– with its cyber-physical systems, information-driven factories, and analytic-based decision making, among other characteristics – but the path to get there is strewn with obstacles.

That’s because the journey to M4.0 is only partly based on technology change.

Its larger and more complex aspects have to do with culture, leadership, and organization, factors that are now provoking a sober re-assessment of just how fast the industry is going to be able to complete its journey to this next state of industrial progress.

The latest Manufacturing Leadership
Council survey on Next-Generation Lead-
ership, one of the Council’s six “Critical Is-
sues” this year, underscores the challenge,
and reveals difficult-to-bridge gaps. The
survey reveals, on one hand, a near univer-
sal belief that Manufacturing 4.0 requires
a substantially different approach and
set of skills on the part of manufacturing
company leaderships (chart 3.) On the
other hand, there is an acknowledgement
among manufacturers that only a fraction
of current leaders understand what M4.0

is all about (chart 4).

So, rather than expecting that the journey to M4.0 will resemble a modern bullet train, speeding to its digital destination, manufacturing leaders see the transition as more like an old-fashioned horse-drawn wagon train -- slowly, sometimes haltingly, slogging its way to a better life in a different place.

At this point in time, most leadership teams have only some familiarity with what M4.0 is going to take. When asked how prepared their executive management teams are to undertake the trip to M4.0,

55% of survey respondents indicated that their teams were “somewhat prepared,”

36% said “not at all prepared,” and only

9% said “very prepared” (chart 6.)

The most-cited reason for the lack of preparedness, according to 57% of survey respondents, is that manufacturing company leaders are simply focused on other issues, like the day-to-day running of the business. But, importantly, two other factors stand out as well – uncertainty about how M4.0 applies to their particular businesses, cited by 32% of respondents, and a lack of understanding of what M4.0 is, indicated by 28% of respondents (chart 7).

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“The journey
to M4.0 is
only partly
based on
technology
change. It’s
larger and
more complex
aspects have
to do with cul-
ture, leader-
ship, and or-
ganization.”