The manufacturing industry will be able to cut production costs by 40% in the next ten years

Virtue Research tested more than 750 product managers from top industrial technology companies around the world and concluded that if manufacturers start implementing future factory plans today, they will save up to 40% of costs in the next ten years.

The research was conducted jointly by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the Laboratory Machine Tools and Production Engineering (WZL) at RWTH Aachen University. Its purpose is to define the factory of the future in 2030. The research areas mainly focus on three major aspects: automobiles, engineering products, and processes.

85% of respondents believe that their company will benefit from the factory of the future; 74% of respondents said that their company has implemented some projects or plans to do so within five years. However, only 25% said they achieved their goals in the past year.

This study analyzes how manufacturing costs can be transformed (lower material costs for manufacturing) and the impact of implementing smart factories over the next ten years. The study found that manufacturing costs will fall by up to 20% in the future, while switching costs may fall by up to 40%. Benefits to manufacturers will include enhanced flexibility, quality, speed, and security.

BCG predicts that in order to make the factory of the future a reality, companies will have to invest 13-19% of annual revenue in factory upgrades each year over the next decade. The head of the BCG Partner Business Innovation Center said that factories in the future will undergo fundamental changes. Assembly lines will be replaced by flexible manufacturing, and workpieces will communicate with production machinery more extensively.

Automobile managers said that smart robots will be the protagonist of the future manufacturing industry, and 60% of the respondents said that enhanced implementation will play an important role in the future, especially in the automobile assembly process. Smart glasses can be used to guide workers to complete the assembly and inform them of assembly errors or safety issues. Hazard information.

The factory of the future will need a strong IT infrastructure and security technology to support it, and qualified employees will also be key. But 38% of Study Automotive respondents cited employee skills as a significant challenge. The factory of the future belongs to the agenda of the top management, and its implementation is not only a production project but also the operating model of the entire company.