Bridging skills gap, creating new services key success factors for manufacturers

Today, 50 per cent of the costs of Internet of Things projects go on integration. The year 2017 will see many manufacturers realising they already have IoT solutions – now they need to integrate them better to leverage the full benefits. 
Prediction 1: Over 80 per cent of manufacturers will realise they already have IoT solutions.
The question is: How easily integrated are they? 
After years of hype we tend to forget that many manufacturers already have IoT capabilities, and have had for years. So, manufacturers need to think carefully about which data-performance-tracking technology is most relevant to them.
For those producing large-scale capital equipment to be deployed in the field, new sensor-enabled data-gathering technology is a fantastic value-add. It enables them to offer maintenance and services around the clock, in tough environments – a serious competitive edge.
Today’s IoT offers tremendous advantages for some … But for others it can be a costly irrelevance.
Prediction 2: In the next three years, apprenticeships will become more important than degrees.
The future of every industry depends on its people, and sometimes good people are hard to find.
Across Europe and the US manufacturers are wrestling with a skills gap. In 2017, solving the skills shortages could bring in a new era of apprenticeships, in-house peer training and manufacturers working more closely with local education institutions to get younger talent into the industry.
A Deloitte study found “over the next decade nearly 3.5 million manufacturing jobs in the US will likely need to be filled. The skills gap is expected to result in 2 million of those jobs going unfilled”.
In Europe the picture is similar. Eighty-two per cent of the executives surveyed in Deloitte’s report believe the skills gap will impact their ability to meet customer demand. Seventy-eight per cent believe it will impact their ability to increase productivity and implement new technologies.
And the study shows that a career in manufacturing is ranked consistently low. Only 37 per cent said they would encourage their children to go for a manufacturing career. So what is to be done? 
Manufacturers need to start being more proactive in spotting and training talent young. Apprenticeships and in-house training will move up the agenda.
For young talent, apprenticeships mean solid, bankable skills with no debt attached. For employers, it means the skills they really want. There are also new types of skills that will be particularly high in demand in the future. A factory will often consist of thousands of IoT sensors and a number of new devices connected to the Internet continuously gathering data. This will result in greater needs to analyse large data volumes and the automation of key processes based on data.
Prediction 3: Some 75 per cent of mid-sized manufacturers in Europe and the US will adopt the transformation of servitisation before 2018. The journey isn’t easy, sales cycles can be longer, new service departments may need to be created, revenue gaps can occur before services mature.
But when manufacturers move beyond the factory walls and ask themselves what it is their customers really need from their products, new relationships, growth and opportunity can flourish.

Antony Bourne is global industry director of industrial and high-tech manufacturing at global enterprise software vendor IFS