Each year, CGI meets face-to-face with business and IT leaders to hear their views on the trends affecting their organizations. In 2018, we conducted 141 in-person interviews with manufacturing executives to learn more about their top trends and priorities.

Increasing focus on data—from integration and analytics to cybersecurity

The top five trends in manufacturing remain the same from last year, but the change in their weighting reflects the industry’s evolving digital transformation journey. This year, digitalization to enable data integration within and beyond the boundaries of the organization remains the top trend. Protecting the enterprise from cyber risks continues to grow as a concern, elevating it to a close second. Rounding off the list, manufacturers remain focused on becoming end-to-end digital organizations to meet customer expectations, adopting Industry 4.0 and transforming from product-centric to customer-centric organizations.

Transformation is accelerating and linking to the ecosystem is a key driver

Manufacturers are at different stages in their transformation journey; however, across the board their maturity is accelerating. This year, 67% of manufacturing executives interviewed have a defined digital strategy in place. Of these, 27% are launching, have operationalized or are realizing results from a strategy that includes their ecosystem partners, while 40% are at similar stages with internally focused enterprise strategies.

Culture change is top challenge to digital transformation

Cultural change and change management remains a top barrier to digital transformation, followed by the growing year-over-year drag experienced from the inability to adopt and modernize technology to become more agile.

Benchmarking internal IT and more

This year, business and IT executives interviewed ranked their satisfaction with their own IT organizations based on 10 key attributes of a world-class IT organization. On average, the business and IT sides of manufacturing executives interviewed are aligned when it comes to their overall global satisfaction levels. However, when examining specific parameters, the satisfaction of business leaders with their IT is significantly lower than the level of satisfaction felt by IT leaders.

CGI can provide clients with a discussion of all available benchmarking, including each client’s positioning, on topics such as digital maturity, IT budgets, IT satisfaction, innovation investments and more.

Discover the insight

Download the 2018 CGI Client Global Insights manufacturing summary infographic for additional trend information. We also invite you to request a copy of our full report and to arrange a personal discussion with a CGI expert for further analysis and insights.

 

Also see the 2017 CGI Client Global Insights industry summaries.