Manufacturing IT: budgets unchanged, focus on cost savings

IT managers in UK manufacturing companies are focusing primarily on developing their existing systems to help reduce costs in their businesses and on getting more out of them. Using IT to communicate and collaborate with suppliers and customers is ranked a close third. These are chief among findings from a survey conducted last month by market researcher Benchmark among more than 600 IT managers on sites with 50 to 500+ staff across the discrete manufacturing and process industry sectors. Benchmark finds users cautiously optimistic for the future of their manufacturing sectors, and responding accordingly within their IT budgets, which are largely unchanged from last year, and unlikely to be cut or increased over the next six months. 37% said their manufacturing sectors were experiencing growth, while 33% judged their situation static. 53% felt they were experiencing a modest recession and 31% indicated they are in a slow growth phase. 75% of IT managers cited getting more out of our existing IT systems as a key requirement; way ahead of intranet development for improved internal communications at 35%. Then came a focus on lean manufacturing (33%), followed by IT Integration and networking projects (31%), knowledge management and business intelligence tools (29%), and mobile computing (25%). ERP development was seventh at (23%), supply chain management next (21%) equal with online catalogues, with factory automation systems 10th at 17% along with online security systems. Interestingly, CRM, basic MRP, stock control and production planning systems, trading exchanges and PDM/PLM were way down the hit list.