Professional services firm PwC reports that South Africa’s manufacturing industry has to keep evolving to remain competitive in the face of global competition through implementing what it calls 'manufacturing excellence programmes'.

The firm notes that while there has been a longstanding battle between effectively producing products against demand and maintaining a sustainable cost base, the modern day challenge of agile manufacturing becoming more cumbersome to implement, remains.

However, the majority of the common challenges currently faced by manufacturing organisations can be addressed through the use of technology.

While digital concepts have a valuable role to play in manufacturing processes, PwC also states that manufacturing excellence programmes remain imperative.

The firm defines manufacturing excellence programmes as the overarching improvement programmes that businesses deploy to extract value.

In terms of transforming manufacturing operations using traditional methods, several concerns have come to the fore, including continuous improvement programmes seldom resulting in step-changes in productivity and consequently often not having prominence in organisations.

The lack of step changes in manufacturing maturity may result in South African companies gradually falling behind global peers and eventually risking obsolescence. 

Also, the availability and trustworthiness of information to make decisions and perform problem solving is often lacking.

PwC also notes that attempts to transform a business using traditional methods often fail as a result of waste created through the process of implementing a manufacturing excellence programme, and are often poorly bought-in from the perspective of change management and onboarding of all stakeholders across the organisation.

Some businesses also struggle to align the manufacturing excellence programme with overarching business strategy and objectives, and poorly integrate between core manufacturing processes and support functions.

PwC South Africa smart manufacturing lead Vinesh Maharaj says this forces manufacturers to think about how to orchestrate all these moving parts while still maintaining a balanced production environment.

To remain globally competitive and uphold a high manufacturing excellence maturity level, manufacturers have to remain lean, fit and ready to react in the best possible way to meet targets, PwC states.

Maharaj says many manufacturing facilities exhibit a low manufacturing maturity, where old ways of working progressively evolve.

So-called “factory blindness” – the normality that is felt by factory workers in their daily routines, disabling them from seeing an environment that is out of order or that needs improvement – is another factor weighing down businesses that fail to adapt.

This phenomenon typically occurs when workers have been conducting the same routine activities for many years and have become resistant to adapting them to become more efficient and effective.

“There seems to be an inert comfortability that is associated with conducting activities the way that it has always been done,” says Maharaj says. This, he says, makes organisations blind to the fact that there are improved, safer and more efficient ways of working in factories.

There are benefits to blending traditional programmes with digital systems, explains PwC South Africa smart manufacturing senior manager Daniel Reddy.

“At the end of the day, any improvement initiative needs to deliver tangible value to the customer. This is generally viewed as a method to either develop the value proposition through enhanced services or a reduction in cost,” he says.

He adds that the objective here is to introduce a culture of measurement using digital tools that sustain the business’ ability to innovate against a quality fitting function.

However, PwC notes that organisations can experience various challenges while trying to implement manufacturing excellence programmes, such as a lack of training and support from leadership, to fear of redundancy and realising that the digital journey is an ongoing one.

“Introducing digital tools will help mitigate these common challenges. There is always an inherent risk that the use of technology can hamper or even exacerbate these issues; however when technology is applied in conjunction with strong cultural and process efficiency fundamentals, it can be used to ease the transition to a culture of continuous improvement,” says Reddy.