I don't think I can answer those questions.  I'm not always sure what my employer is doing.  I have even less idea what the competitors are up to.

I don't think I can answer those questions.  I'm not always sure what my employer is doing.  I have even less idea what the competitors are up to.

And I struggle to see what value it's going to add to anyone (as someone who until a few years ago was technical lead for a manufacturing business) - it's obviously aimed to help somebody sell something to somebody else, but the questions are so vague I'd be very wary of trusting the results. 

Key issues for me would be:

"Digital transformation": I even went off and Googled this last night, and I'm still not convinced there's a clear description of what this actually means. For this survey to be useful it would need to be much more precisely defined.

"Automation": again, what is meant by this in the context of this survey? High volume (and even low volume) manufacturers have been making "significant investments" in automation for well over 100 years.

"Your sector": at no point is the question asked "what is your sector?" My career has always been in high value low volume manufacturing (across a range of industries), techniques which are applicable to high volume low value manufacturing are likely to be inappropriate in my sector, or at least need serious thought in their application, and vice versa. (I remember the days when someone sold our top management the benefits of Six Sigma, which is a good technique but a bit difficult to apply without proper thought on production runs of a couple of hundred a year...we did produce some staggeringly meaningless graphs until eventually they got bored and left us alone again.)

This comes across as a survey designed to give BD executives in consultancies figures to persuade manufacturing companies that they need their services or else they'll be "left behind". (I'm allowed to be cynical about BD in consultancy since I do it myself some of the time .) I think any well managed manufacturing company will come straight back and say "show us hard figures relating to specific techniques relevant to our sector". In my experience manufacturing, being so close to its profit and loss figures, is pretty good at looking very hard before justifying any investment.

I'm still feeling grumpy having Googled "Digitisation" which led me in to reading articles about "Industry 4.0". I am really struggling to see where the step change is, it seems to be ignoring all the developments that have been progressively made in manufacturing over very many years. It is very likely I'm missing something. However maybe people have just found a marketing spin for something that doesn't really exist as a "thing".

What particularly strikes me, and I know this is being very pedantic, is that most if the systems that are touted as "digitalisation" are actually very analogue in their behaviour. A digital system is on or off, good or bad, started or stopped. This is actually about systems that can subtly adapt and react. But (as an analogue engineer) I just need to accept that there is no more point me banging on about the misuse of the word "digital" * than there is for others getting upset about the misuse of "engineer" or "manager". (Or "plastic" - I remember when engineers used to complain that it should be "plastics box" because a "plastic box" would be a box that was deformable. That didn't catch on either.) I am trying not to turn into another Grumpy Old Engineer!!

Cheers,

Andy

 * The IET is as bad as anyone when it comes to this...