In the 2020 OwnBackup Resilience.Work event, Peter Coffee, VP of Strategic Research at Salesforce, identified key challenges process manufacturing is facing today that necessitate a change in the status quo. As he aptly stated, our capacity for change has been accelerated with 2025 arriving 60 months early.

Challenges in the landscape have been amplified, including globalization, changing consumer and partner habits, increased competition, and of course, the elephant in the room, COVID-19. A key success factor in overcoming these obstacles is silo-busting. We are seeing this as an organizational necessity time and time again. You can have an individually correct performance of actions and still have bad results. If your process manufacturing organization isn’t considering both the macro and micro forces at work driving change, your efforts to level up the digital landscape will never quite be enough. 

That’s why we want to take some time to go over what the macro (impacting the industry at large) and micro (pushing individual companies) drivers for change are as a process manufacturer at this unique time. Let’s dive in. 

Macro-level forces for change

The abrupt business changes ushered in by COVID-19 have acted as an accelerant to already burgeoning issues in the manufacturing industry. Companies in this space have had problems pivoting to new customer expectations for a completely digital experience and tracking inventory and orders with an automated process. Now, with the ongoing pandemic wreaking continual havoc and uncertainty for all, manufacturers are finding their budgets slowed down and supply chains stalled, leading to a bigger push to do something—anything—right now.

But if you want the changes from a COVID-19 stimulant on business to last long-term, you have to be thoughtful and consider all the macro-level forces that were at play even before the coronavirus hit the world stage. Additional macro-level forces that have long been at work in the manufacturing space at large, and which COVID has only sped up the need to address, include…

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