Ninety percent of companies in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry are yet to leverage digital technologies at scale, and that even the best equipped of them are struggling to make their digital deployments pay.
This is the conclusion of a new report from SmarterChains, a Switzerland-based Industry 4.0 consultancy, which ran a poll of “significant players” within the CPG space to discern the sector’s progress with analytics and automation technologies, as well as digitally-minded leadership.
The poll has been combined with a report, sponsored by another consultancy, in the form of EY, which chews through 336,000 data points covered 500 technologies “down to production line level, across teams of all factory operations”.
It finds around 20 percent of CPG factories have set a springboard for digital transformation, with connectivity and compute hardware and analytics and analytics software, but only two percent are making decent use of it.
Fabian Wehren, smart factory leader at EY EMEIA, commented: “Even though a fourth of the factories surveyed have digital-ready infrastructure in place, only two percent are effectively using tech-augmented workforce or automated material flow.”
The study claims to help manufacturers and supply chain companies to adopt new technologies, drive automation and data exchange, and unlock value. “[It] provides clear and objective measurement of Industry 4.0 capabilities for the CPG sector, which will help companies navigate disruption in the months and years ahead,” said Wehren.
Gustavo Ghory, chairman and co-founder at SmarterChains, said: “This study provides insightful information and down to earth guidance for companies to adapt to new technological realities. A transformative approach to turn the idea of digital operations into a tangible and sustained reality enabling competitiveness.”
The study notes the Covid-19 outbreak has exposed the fragility of manufacturing and supply chain businesses. The report seeks to prep the CPG industry to use technology to cope with future crisis scenarios.
