Reimagining Manufacturing Operations After COVID-19

Updated November 2026. This was first published on 31 October 2022. The idea is the same. Any number below is what the original piece said then. It is not a new count.

Key takeaways

The unexpected COVID-19 pandemic brought many challenges, especially for the manufacturing industries.
According to the recent report presented at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) shows a massive fall of around 5%-15% due to the pandemic, majorly in the manufacturing sector.
Digital transformation was gaining pace, and many SMEs were adopting it to increase productivity and reduce costs, as already seen as the immediate response to the pandemic.

The unexpected COVID-19 pandemic brought many challenges, especially for the manufacturing industries. According to the recent report presented at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) shows a massive fall of around 5%-15% due to the pandemic, majorly in the manufacturing sector.

Digital transformation was gaining pace, and many SMEs were adopting it to increase productivity and reduce costs, as already seen as the immediate response to the pandemic. Moreover, many industry leaders started using Industry 4.0 solutions to continue their manufacturing operations.

According to a survey, around 39 percent of industries have implemented a nerve center, in simple terms, a control tower. This approach increases end-to-end supply-chain transparency, which later became a fast-tracking automation program to help stem worker shortages from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two-Speed Adoption of Industry 4.0 Technologies #

Industry 4.0 adoption gained a massive pace, and its role has become more critical. The pandemic forced companies to think about building the blocks to stand firm in future crises and restoring operations using digital technologies.

During a survey conducted by McKinsey on manufacturing and top supply-chain professionals, it was found that around 90 percent of them plan to invest in talent for digitization, and about 93 percent plan to focus majorly on the resilience of their supply chain.

Even with such a high percentage, there’s an expectation that the upswing in technology will not be symmetric. This will be because of two opposing forces—the urgency to develop resilience after the pandemic and the agility to deal with the crisis (including future crises) against the constraints already imposed by cash preservation.

The asymmetricity will result in three archetypes of adoption pathways.

Accelerated Adoption #

Adoption will be accelerated for win case solutions and help companies quickly respond and adapt to new norms.

Differential Adoption Rates #

Differential adoption rates are more likely to work as a solution for logistics automation digital twins that require operations technology (OT), foundational information technology (IT), and data infrastructure. Companies with manufacturing-execution systems, data marts, data lakes, and IT/OT stacks are likely to grow better than those companies, mainly SMEs, that lack these what it can do. The later companies would find themselves in a more financially challenging position. These business challenges may delay setup until they find the financial muscle to invest or build the necessary foundations.

Moreover, there are several automation technologies already seeing a split in adoption. Earlier, China was the leading robot maker in 2019. when robot sales fell 20 percent in 2020 compared to 2019, there was a substantial downfall in the momentum three times earlier.

Deferred Adoption #

Deferred adoption is crucial for solutions with an unclear long-term payback period and requiring higher capital expenditure, for instance, nanotechnologies, blockchain, and smart automation systems.

A Resilient, Digitized Future Beyond the Factory’s Four Walls #

There are several reasons apart from the accelerated online purchases, trade barriers, and pandemic news that increase the pressure on supply chains. According to business leaders, sustainable digital supply chains and resilience are among the most crucial differentiators for business. Due to this, many companies are now looking forward to optimizing end-to-end business processes within their entire value chain.

They also recognized that purchasing experience has almost no effect on customer experience. Moreover, the supply chain has become a critical customer experience driver. Also, when companies run highly resilient supply chains, they can increase customer experience and satisfaction by more than 82 percent.

Moreover, companies can easily deploy digital solutions to address planning challenges within and beyond the company’s four walls. This helps companies reach the end-to-end value chain and fix delivery, operational, and disruptions challenges at production plants or suppliers.

The Process: Start to End #

Planning For Operations #

Panning is one of the core elements of manufacturing and supply-chain operations, traditionally conducted in silos or teams. Production planning, demand forecasting, supply planning, and logistics planning are handled separately by separate team members and units.

Making The Products #

Many manufacturing disruptions from different sources, including safe-distancing measures, restricted migrant-labour movement and staggered worker attendance, have highly affected manufacturing products after the pandemic.

But, digital technologies can mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in several ways, including operational efficiency, employee safety, product quality, and asset productivity.

Boosting operational continuity and employee safety:** Digital technologies eliminate the need for noncritical employees to leave their homes by simply enabling remote work and collaboration.

Improving productivity and performance management:** Most companies, especially SMEs, still use traditional pen-paper and spreadsheet methods for data collection. are more prone to errors and inaccuracies. Digital technologies can overcome such issues as they are less prone to errors and bugs and don’t require multiple checks or validation.

Increasing asset utilization and efficiency:** Businesses increase their productivity and efficiency with modern assets and tools. Asset-like wearable technologies can enhance remote assistance in maintenance. For example, AR glasses can help operators when they need off-site assistance due to travel limitations.

Improved quality:** Digital technologies can help quality management with modern tools for data collection, data management, and quality checking, for example, CRM data quality assessment software.

Delivering The Finished Goods #

Product delivery is complex, especially if it involves third-party logistics partners. The COVID-19 pandemic made it more complicated by adding transportation complexities, new packaging rules, and last-mile contactless delivery. But, digital technologies can help overcome these delivery-related complexities with modern logistics and warehousing tools.

Logistics:** Digital technology like a logistics-control tower can help companies create live visibility and transparency throughout the process. This visibility will help at every stage of outbound logistics, like unloading at the delivery point and loading in the warehouse.

Warehousing:** Automated material storage, shuttle systems, smart shelves, retrieval systems, cobots, and smart picking robots can reduce warehousing complexities.

Agility Through Synchronized Planning #

The pandemic has taught many things to the business world, especially about the necessity of speed and agility. With visibility (transparency) and synchronization throughout the operations, a business gets ready to respond and adapt to any economic turbulence. Synchronized planning is one of the essential ingredients for agility. At SAP, the supply and demand network, from production to logistics planning, is a continuum.

Historically, many studies enunciate that finance departments have struggled with the concept of agility due to a significant gap between the periodic nature of financial operations and the company’s regular business activities. Adopting continuous planning is the only way to align your company’s business operations with the finance activities to overcome inefficiency.

Productivity Through Intelligent and Predictive Technologies #

Businesses’ productivity increases when their plant and factory become more autonomous, smarter and connected. A smartly growing company is one where the team members or employees are empowered to use smart and predictive technologies more intelligently and effectively.

These modern technologies can help SMEs win in this competitive marketplace or help to survive in several fields like e-commerce, manufacturing, accounting, marketing, human resources, and customer relations.

External AI-driven transformation to develop new organizational cultures and strategies, create business models, and build business alliances. Improving the operation of SMEs by gradually processing optimization and improvement within the organizational boundary.

After the pandemic, things are not that different, and businesses still wish to opt for AI-driven technologies.

Conclusion #

The COVID-19 pandemic showed many humanitarian challenges on a global scale that require an entirely new type of collaboration to address. As businesses and companies are set to restart a new normal, they have a unique opportunity to reimagine a productive future plan with digitized, resilient operations.

Also, there are many technologies like extended reality, blockchain, and data collection tools that businesses can use to enhance human-machine interaction. Apart from this, businesses can also make use of advanced engineering technologies like renewable energy and additive manufacturing in their production line after COVID-19.

Questions and answers #

What is the main point? #

The unexpected COVID-19 pandemic brought many challenges, especially for the manufacturing industries.

What else did the original piece say? #

According to the recent report presented at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) shows a massive fall of around 5%-15% due to the pandemic, majorly in the manufacturing sector.