Sorry, Robots: People Still Perform Most Manufacturing Tasks
PALO ALTO, CA—Despite the widespread fear that robots will be taking over the factory floor, new data recently released by A.T. Kearney and Drishti show that humans still perform 72 percent of manufacturing tasks.
The survey found that there is an almost universal lack of data into the activities that people perform in the factory. This analytical gap severely limits manufacturers' ability to make informed decisions on capacity planning, workforce management, process engineering and many other strategic domains. And it suggests that manufacturers may overprioritize automation due to an inability to quantify investments in the human work" force that would result in greater efficiencies. Perhaps, as a result, 39 percent of engineering time is spent on root cause investigations to trace defects–another manual expenditure of time that could be greatly reduced with better data.