While perhaps many don’t realize it, the highly diverse New England manufacturing community is quite healthy. Especially in areas where cutting-edge R&D is combined with robust information technology and communications.
A recent Deloitte-sponsored Boston Business Journal article discusses the region’s thriving manufacturing technology segment. This category includes such technologies as:
- The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
- Robotics
- Artificial intelligence (linking supply chains, R&D, sales, and quality control processes together)
- Cognitive learning (using language, sensors and more to yield benefits through a factory)
- Public/private/hybrid cloud
Some stats from the BBJ article:
- Boston alone represents 10 percent of the entire U.S. manufacturing tech market
- Since 2013, New England has seen about 500 manufacturing tech deals
- In that same time, this segment saw $3 billion in investor funding (making it second only to the San Francisco Bay area)
New England Manufacturing Traditions
Admittedly, we’ve seen big industries come and go (at varying speeds and degrees) in the past 400 years. Some of those manufacturing sectors that have peaked and faded include: whale oil and candles, textiles, shoes, ships, pocket watches, and more. Often, the inability to adapt hampered these industries.
And when factories close, many people who have worked hard in them lose their jobs, and this certainly leaves a strong impression. And some may be pessimistic about manufacturing here because it’s no longer as centralized in a few cities, such as New Bedford, Manchester, or Lowell. It’s easy to drive through a city like Fall River and see the many giant granite and brick castle-like factories, now idle or converted to housing or small business, and conclude manufacturing has all gone overseas.
Technology: A Growth Engine
But as we’ve seen, New England doesn’t just have a history in manufacturing — it has a great and varied high-tech future, too. This future will be powered by machine learning, cutting-edge collaboration, the IoT, cloud computing platforms, and other tech advances. And instead of burning fossil fuels, it’s powered more and more by green IT and knowledge.
New England manufacturing is not only strong, it’s more diverse than ever. And it covers a lot of heterogeneous segments, from biotech/pharmaceuticals to semiconductors and precision instruments, and on and on. And its smaller scale means that specific neighborhoods can house major clusters of activity, as another Deloitte article notes. In just the Boston-Cambridge region, we have budding biotech, software startup, and health care centers.
Manufacturing And IT
The lessons of all this? Successful manufacturing today must be smarter, more agile, less labor-intensive, cleaner, and more precise than before. Competition is also global: Manufacturers frequently must make do with less in money and manpower — so they have to compensate with better IT.
As a manufacturer, you must have basic tech platforms in place to enable secure communications, data backup, storage, business continuity, and more. And that’s where BCS comes in: We support the IT platform needs of New England manufacturers.
Ready to discuss how robust collaboration and networking tech can give your manufacturing enterprise a competitive advantage?
