Is Your Culture Ready for Industry 4.0?
While Industry 4.0 has been a buzzword for some time, the technology has become more affordable and effective enough in the last two to three years to make it a reality for more companies. There’s an increasingly clear ROI from technology spending, clearing a hurdle that in the past has held back many manufacturers from committing to a digital transformation.
Choosing the right tech tools and being able to afford them are not the defining problems anymore. Two similar manufacturing companies can adopt exactly the same technology and have very divergent results. The difference will lie in how ready the companies are to absorb the technology and their effectiveness in getting the most out of it.
That’s why the successful adoption of Industry 4.0 technology requires a much broader change in company culture, one that needs to be led by the C-suite and carried out by the business units.
There are four key areas that manufacturing firms need to get right in order to make the most of technology adoption.
1. Leadership.
It’s not enough for company leaders to cheerlead technology from the sidelines: They need to embody the change they want to see. CEOs and the rest of the C-suite need to model the innovation in the way they do their jobs every day, setting an example in their use of tools like data analytics. In staff communications, they should be pushing for the widespread adoption of new technology and new processes and putting performance measures in place around it.
Ida Byrd-Hill is a futurist, economist and CEO of Automation Workz, a cybersecurity reskilling and diversity consulting firm. She is author of Invisible Talent Market, a Black Labor Economics History book. She holds an MBA from the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University, with a specialization in People Management/Strategy and a BA Economics from the University of Michigan- Ann Arbor. Byrd-Hill has appeared in Associated Press, BBC, Crain’s Business Detroit, CW Street Beat, Cybercrime Magazine, Daytime NBC, Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, Essence Magazine, Good Morning America, Let It Rip, Michigan Chronicle, Model D, NPR, PBS, and X-conomy. www.autoworkz.org/diverse-lens
