Assessment: How Strong Is Your Manufacturing Digital Transformation Strategy?

Digital transformation has become a priority in manufacturing. After major disruption over the past two years, manufacturers recognize that technology-driven smart factories are better prepared to manage change. But how does your digital transformation strategy compare to other companies in the market?

Aptean is giving you the opportunity to benchmark your manufacturing business in our online digital transformation assessment—to discover whether you’re ahead or behind the curve.

Take the manufacturing digital transformation quiz.

How Many Manufacturers Have Achieved Digital Transformation Already?

To see how successfully manufacturers are embracing automation, we recently surveyed 275 organizations across North America. You can check out our in-depth analysis of the results in our whitepaper, Perception Vs Reality: Manufacturing’s Digital Transformation Disconnect. 

When we started analyzing manufacturers’ attitudes to digital transformation, one thing became clear: there is currently a broad spectrum of automation and data insight capabilities.

72% of North American manufacturing companies have a smart factory roadmap in place for some or all departments. But whether that roadmap translates to technology deployment is a different matter. Many manufacturers are yet to act on their digital transformation strategy.

Our study found that 22% of manufacturers haven’t made any smart changes or implementations to-date, even if they’ve created a digital transformation roadmap. In contrast, 10% have achieved highly sophisticated automation capabilities already. The rest of the manufacturing sector falls somewhere in between. But where exactly?

To make our research data more meaningful, we divided the results into five stages of digital transformation in manufacturing. Not only did this show us the difference between industry leaders and laggards; it revealed that many manufacturers think their smart manufacturing strategy is more advanced than it is in reality.

Are your ambitions and actions keeping pace with each other? Take our 2-minute digital transformation quiz to track your progress and discover where you lie on the smart factory curve. You’ll see what percentage of manufacturers are ahead of you, and how many are playing catch-up with your business.

Which Smart Factory Areas Should Manufacturers Prioritize?

While most manufacturers recognize the importance of digital transformation in getting their business future-fit, many aren’t sure what to change first. Our assessment can help you work this out.

Smart factory transformation is an end-to-end initiative. However, some areas of your business will benefit from priority attention—and your choice of manufacturing technology will greatly influence the sustainability and scalability of your digital transformation roadmap.

Our interactive quiz breaks manufacturing digital transformation down into 7 key areas, to help you answer critical questions on:

• Strategy: Are you working from a cohesive, holistic plan to drive change?

• Data: Can you make decisions based on accurate, up-to-date business intelligence

• Operations: Is everyone working collaboratively using integrated digital systems

• Employees: Are your teams embracing technology and using it to work smarter

• Customers: Have the investments you’ve made delivered tangible customer benefits

• Culture: Are you using smart factory data to identify and pursue new profit opportunities? 

• Investment: Do you have the right technology and training to drive digital transformation? 

On the result page, you’ll see which of these areas are strongest and most vulnerable, to help you prioritize change.

What’s the Next Step in Manufacturing’s Digital Transformation?

Ultimately, all manufacturers are striving for the same thing: to connect your data, people and processes in a smart factory set-up. So you can make effective decisions based on real-time information, understanding the impact of internal and external influences on your output and business roadmap. However, every business will have a different route to achieving this.

To help you take the right next step with your manufacturing digital transformation strategy, our interactive quiz includes tailored guidance based on your results. This will enable you build a scalable, sustainable route to automation, implementing technologies that work holistically to drive business-wide improvements.

Take Aptean’s digital transformation in manufacturing assessment to discover whether your organization is ahead or behind the curve. Or, explore our manufacturing software solutions to future-proof you business and power growth.