Rockwell Survey Finds Consumer Packaged Goods Manufacturers Increasingly Embracing Automation

Source: Ben Munson for ThomasNet

For many reasons, consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers are accelerating their investments in digital transformation. According to Rockwell’s 8th annual State of Smart Manufacturing survey , 42% of respondents said they’re stepping up their game to keep up with competitors. In comparison, another 44% said they are embracing digital transformation to improve quality.

Rockwell Automation, one of the largest global companies specializing in industrial automation and digital transformation, rounded up responses from 216 leaders in the CPG manufacturing space across 13 countries. The report focused on home and personal care, as well as food and beverage manufacturers.

We recently sat down with Lee Coffey, the strategic marketing manager of consumer packaged goods at Rockwell Automation , to dig deeper into the survey results, how manufacturers are dealing with market disruptions like inflation, what’s driving the shift toward automation, and how workforces are receiving the changes.

Thomas Insights (TI): Are there internal adjustments CPG manufacturers can make to mitigate the effects of inflation?

Lee Coffey (LC):?I would point them toward connected manufacturing systems. What Rockwell is really strongly behind is the connected enterprise, which enables companies to more quickly respond to external events by providing real-time data and insights. So, when that external event occurs, their connected systems can more rapidly analyze more data, identify bottlenecks and opportunities for optimization, and really just empower their workforce to make better and faster decisions with more up-to-date information.

In the event of market volatility, enterprises can more swiftly adapt to meet changes in the market.

TI: What are the biggest trends you’re seeing around digital transformation among CPG manufacturers?

LC: What we’re seeing is an eagerness and heightened urgency around investing in smart manufacturing and adopting technologies at a much faster rate than we’ve ever seen. Four main drivers that came out of the survey for technology adoption were improving quality, keeping up with competitors, meeting the needs of consumer behavior, and minimizing cost. I think those make a lot of sense if you think of quality as critically important for CPG and how they differentiate. They have a lot of competition in terms of store brands and new startups, so quality is really how they differentiate their product in the market. A lot of times, they work on trade secrets, and they don’t publish their recipes. So, they need to keep quality very consistent to avoid consumer switching.

But they’re also doing it to keep up with the competition. There are up-and-comers that are also investing. And then it ultimately comes down to the consumer. We’re seeing a lot of consumers have heightened expectations for faster delivery and more variety, and that just means more operational complexity for our customers. So, a lot of them are leaning on technology to help ease that burden.

TI: When you talk about smart manufacturing, how much of that involves process automation?

LC: In the report, it found that 66% of businesses are already investing in process automation. So, two-thirds of companies already have some sort of process automation, and another 48% said they intend to increase that investment to address labor shortages. I think labor’s the big driver here. A lot of investment around automation, software, and analytics is intended to help augment an already short workforce.

Interestingly, 90% of the manufacturers mentioned that they believe they will maintain or increase their workforce due to technology investment. Automation is sometimes associated with fears of job loss, and this proves that not only do manufacturers feel that technology will be a net gain, it’ll be good for the bottom line as well.

TI: Do you think attitudes toward automation will change if it continues to complement existing workforces?

LC: Yeah, I think so. I’m more of an optimist, and if history’s any indicator, you look back at the computer and internet coming out, we thought those were going to be major job killers. But they really just created an entirely new set of jobs that we didn’t even know existed at the time. I think we’ll see the same here when you’re implementing automation.

Not only that, but I think you’ll get more positive responses from employees once they begin to see that they’re now doing more high-value tasks. They’ll move from doing repetitive, mundane, and maybe unsafe tasks to doing more things involving creativity and using ingenuity to drive value in ways they may haven’t done in the past. So, I think that will be welcomed by the employee base over the long term.