The manufacturing and engineering sector has traditionally been seen as one of the less dynamic when it comes to IT.
The UK’s manufacturing decline over the past two decades has left many organisations starved of financial resources, and the monolithic nature of such enterprises means that IT innovation is more difficult than in richer, nimbler sectors such as financial services.
But change is afoot. Successful manufacturing and engineering organisations of the future will be those that reorganise systems to give them the flexibility to shift different parts of their operations to the most economic locations and service providers, wherever they may be.
Dan Miklovic, managing vice president of Gartner’s manufacturing advisory service, says that with the trend towards outsourcing and offshoring, the analyst is seeing strong demand for good project management.
‘But as well as the business skills, there is also a need for technologists who understand the science behind project management and who have experience of the technology and the applications that support it.’
In addition, working across different locations with different partners requires effective collaborative technology.
Miklovic says: ‘This means having good knowledge of XML, data interchange standards and the workflow processes around product design.’
Another key driver for success will be the ability to better integrate plant-floor data with business systems. Miklovic says emphasis is being placed on trying to make the organisation more real-time, adaptive and agile.
‘Much of the data you need comes from systems that rely on shop-floor standards,’ he says. ‘As a result, the sector needs technologists familiar with things such as programmable logic controllers and distributed control systems, experienced in networking technology and industry standards for integrating shop-floor data with business systems.’
Miklovic is also seeing huge demand for effective security solutions, a problem that can be very tricky in this sector since so many applications are still running on Windows NT4.
‘The sector needs security architects with a solution other than telling the organisation to upgrade to XP Service Pack 2. That doesn’t work in manufacturing as often they can’t upgrade critical applications,’ he says.
Another skill in demand is experience with product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, which Miklovic believes will be the next big enterprise application in the sector.
Joshua Hanson, a senior consultant at IT recruitment firm Harvey Nash, says demand for radio frequency identification skills is also growing as firms strive to streamline supply chains.
Qualification for RFID skills
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