Insight

Industrial Manufacturing: Road to New Reality

COVID-19 helped accelerate digital transformation, a trend that can help manufacturers be more agile, reduce their cost base, and leverage new technologies.

Brian Heckler

Brian Heckler

National Sector Leader, Industrial Manufacturing, KPMG US

+1 312-665-2693

Video transcript

Hi it's Brian Heckler, your National Sector Leader for Industrial Manufacturing, giving you an update on what we've seen over the past year with COVID and our manufacturers. Last year, I talked with you about their focus on predicting demand, managing their cash flow, and forecasting and liquidity and working through their manufacturing operations, and their people.

What we see today is surprising recovery, a relatively stable element of manufacturing, their supply chains are challenged with many suppliers having real financial difficulty and employees in the workforce getting back to work and consistently showing up. One of the major factors is acceptance around the vaccine. Nearly two-thirds of people polled, and manufacturers, are concerned about taking the vaccine and this is a big important push of many manufacturers to make sure their workforce is safe and stable into the future.

Another aspect that we've seen around managing manufacturing cash flow and forecasting demand has been around digital transformation. Many of our manufacturers have accelerated their plans from moving from on-prem legacy ERPs to the cloud and doing end-to-end digital transformation, from the customer back to their back office, this is going to be an important trend for the next years to come to really help enable our manufacturers to be more agile, reduce their cost, brace and be able to leverage new technologies.


 

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