Welcome to the latest in my occasional series of polemics on this subject! It’s been inspired by two things. First is my introduction to SIRI. No, not the Apple assistant but the Smart Industry Readiness Index. I was introduced to this during a presentation given by Nick Leeder in collaboration with Ryan at the Transform Industry #TransformIndustry 4th Annual Digital Manufacturing Summit.
This offers a global comparison of the digital manufacturing maturity of industrialised countries. And it’s a sobering picture. As the infographic at the top of this article shows, the UK is lagging behind. Forget Industry 4.0 – as I’ve been saying for a while (got to love a bit of confirmation bias)! My experience of UK manufacturing businesses is that they aren’t even at Industry 3.0.
So why is digital adoption by UK manufacturing so far behind? I would argue that much of the digital innovation industry, which has developed to address this challenge, is poorly suited to the needs of the UK sector.
As I’ve mentioned numerous times, over 80% of UK manufacturing comprise businesses with less that 20 employees. The first challenge lies in effectively communicating the opportunities to a sector made up of thousands of businesses. Adoption is inevitably only achieved by winning hearts and minds one-by-one. Next these companies are running lean with limited capacity or capital for capability improvement – anything they do needs to be low cost and yield rapid results. When I attend digital manufacturing expos, much of the technology on show is costly and complex data acquisition systems. Understanding causes of failure is important but often these Micro-SMEs already know what the problems are that they need to solve and need practical, rapidly implementable solutions that give immediate commercial benefit. The challenge here is that there really are very few one-size-fits-all solutions so it’s great to see that there are a growing number of capable consultancies pitching their services at SMEs and micro-SMEs.
There is, of course, another issue and that is the demographic of the UK sector characterised by an aging workforce and management teams to whom the digital world is inexplicable and scary. Perversely the solution may lie with AI. I learnt a new buzz phrase at the Summit – ‘prompt engineering’. A fancy way to describe asking the right questions of AI. The reality is that, if the owners of manufacturing SMEs can just learn to speak effectively to AI (and reality check the answers), it can take them a long way towards identifying the options open to achieve digital transformations specifically appropriate to their business. And help them to engage with the digital transformation sector. So perhaps the starting point is widespread basic AI training?
The other prompt for this article is the Industrial Strategy green paper that the new government has released for consultation. It seems to be well considered and recognises that, compared to global competitors, UK manufacturing ‘lags in adoption of intermediate digital technologies. And it recognises the economic benefits from growing the digital manufacturing technology sector. But it doesn’t mention ensuring the adoption of those same technologies throughout the UK manufacturing sector. Once again, the focus is on R&D and devalues the economic benefits of adoption downstream in order to grow a technically advanced domestic manufacturing sector.
And it’s concerning that SMEs are specifically referred to only twice in the whole document. I worry that the government doesn’t recognise the specific composition of the UK sector and how that has to inform digital implementation strategies.