What Are Some of the Biggest Challenges in Manufacturing?

Top Manufacturing Challenges and How Your Business Can Solve Them

The market can be like the sea, prosperous in opportunity and wrought with fluctuation. 

Manufacturing challenges can spontaneously turn the tide on any business. If your business doesn’t have the tools to weather the tempest, even the smallest manufacturing problems could sink you.

Find out the eight biggest challenges in manufacturing and how you can overcome them. 

Table of Contents

• 8 Big Challenges in the Manufacturing Industry

• #1: Supply Chain Disruption

• #2 Material Shortages

• #3: Inability To Keep Up With Projects

• #4: Problems Integrating New Technology

• #5: Maintenance and Overhead Costs

• #6: Knowing When To Scale Your Business

• #7: The Need for Automation

• #8: Inflation

• UpKeep Is Here To Help Overcome Your Greatest Manufacturing Problems

8 Big Challenges in the Manufacturing Industry

A well-oiled machine only runs as well as its parts, the same goes for a business. Many companies involve a lot of working parts, the same can be said about their assets like equipment and parts inventory. 

Challenges in the manufacturing industry can throw a wrench into your operations. Fortunately, UpKeep is designed to help businesses brace against manufacturing challenges and operate at the most efficient level. 

#1: Supply Chain Disruption

Supply chains may have a significant impact on business revenue. According to a Deloitte survey on retail and manufacturing companies, 79% of companies with highly efficient supply chains saw a more substantial revenue growth than average.

As the pandemic revealed, supply chain disruptions can substantially impact business growth and profit. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Small Business Pulse Survey, around 38.8% of small businesses reported supply chain delays. The manufacturing sector took the biggest hit at 64.9% reporting delays, followed by the retail industry at 58.9%, and the construction industry at 58.5%. 

Supply chain disruptions can result from sheer bad luck and lack of insight.

A McKinsey survey found that 45% of businesses have limited visibility on their supply chain. Most companies can only see as far as their first supply, which can often lead to disruptions, inefficiencies, and challenges when managing inventory. 

#2: Material Shortages

Supply chain disruption can be intrinsic to material shortages. Other related causes for material shortages include:

• Unexpected spikes in demand

• Labor shortage

• Conditions that make manufacturing difficult like war or climate

Material shortages result in price hikes that could drastically increase material costs and result in businesses competing over access to raw materials. And without raw materials, many products can’t be produced in the volumes that are needed to meet consumer demand.

Some examples of these effects can be attested by the global copper shortage: 

The International Copper Study Group (ICSG) forecasted a supply shortfall of 431,000 tonnes in 2022, out of the 22 million tonnes needed for overall demand. However, this deficit is expected to snowball. 

Mckinsey, a global business insight institution, projects that the demand for copper will increase to 36.6 million tonnes by 2031. They also predict that the available supply will be around 30.1 million tonnes, leaving a hefty 6.5 million gap. 

How UpKeep Can Help With Our Parts & Inventory Feature

While UpKeep’s maintenance software and manufacturing CMMS cannot solve manufacturing challenges like supply chain disruption or material shortages, it can help facilitate how you make the most out of your available resources and inventory. 

With UpKeep’s inventory control software, you can:

• Avoid stockouts: Set minimum quantity thresholds on parts and create alerts to avoid running out of materials. 

• Produce consistent documentation with barcodes: Create and document a unique barcode for each part. Allow technicians to easily part barcodes to populate work orders.

• Communicate over mobile work orders: Cut response times so inventory isn’t sitting on the line for too long. Receive notifications on which parts need to be ordered so you can get ahead of any unexpected supply chain disruptions.

• Facilitate inventory accuracy: UpKeep automatically adjusts inventory counts when an asset is added to a work order. You’ll be able to know when and where all of your parts are to avoid overordering.

• Schedule routine machine audits and maintenance: Maintain your machine parts with routine preventative maintenance. Extend the life of your machine parts and equipment to avoid costly breakdowns. Calibrate parts regularly to ensure peak performance and lessened waste.

#3: Inability To Keep Up With Projects

A common problem for team managers is their inability to predict all activities and work streams that are needed for operations. With changes in the market and fluctuating costs, some factors may inevitably be left out of the project plan. 

It’s not necessarily a matter of planning but a need for good oversight. Even the most well-planned projects can collapse without good visibility.  

How UpKeep Can Help With Our Work Order Management Feature

UpKeep allows management to have oversight of all work orders and asset health. We can help your managers:

• Assign and prioritize any work order.

• Receive real-time work order updates.

• Use data to make future decisions.

• Condense workload and automate repetitive tasks.

• Review trends to pinpoint cracks and bottlenecks in operations.

• Prioritize projects based on cost, need, and availability.

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#4: Problems Integrating New Technology

Technology paralysis is a common term used to describe people, or businesses, that are disinclined to integrate new technology. Software like CMMS is designed to make things more efficient for businesses, but this is not always surefire. 

Implementing certain technology could potentially result in recurrent manufacturing problems (when tech like CMMS should provide solutions.) Fortunately, human behavior mostly has a hand in this challenge. 

Common problems businesses have with integrating new technology include:

• Adopting inadequate tech just because it’s new

• Not implementing the most beneficial systems and procedures

• Reluctance among staff to change

• Not monitoring data

• Insufficient training which could lead to improper utilization of tech

How UpKeep Can Help With Our Integrations Feature

UpKeep isn’t just new tech, it’s top-rated. 

Our systems provide easy-to-use interfaces and communication channels so that even your least tech-savvy employee will be able to keep up. We also provide 24/7 customer service and training with our software experts. UpKeep’s maintenance software also provides data monitoring so you can keep a pulse on all maintenance affairs. 

Our software has made it easy to integrate our CMMS with other systems your business might use. This way you can centralize operations to make it easier to manage your business. 

#5: Maintenance and Overhead Costs

As a company grows it generates more profit, but it also requires a little more to feed the machines that generate return. This means equipment breaks more, more space is needed, and operating costs increase. 

Manufacturing challenges like maintenance and overhead costs are common issues. As long as the business is running, they’ll be there. The problem doesn’t lie in its existence, but how this manufacturing problem is managed. 

How UpKeep Can Help With Our Preventive Maintenance Feature

As your profits rise, your equipment is used more. As your equipment is used more, it degrades and breaks down. Regularly scheduled audits and preventative maintenance are required to maximize your return on investment (ROI) on your assets. Preventative maintenance also reduces energy costs. 

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, companies that employ preventative maintenance can save an average of 12-18% in energy costs. You can use UpKeep’s Meters feature to create preventative maintenance schedules based on machine cycles, vehicle mileage, or any other unit of measure. 

Using UpKeep you can also:

• Reduce asset and equipment downtime by an estimated 26%.

• Extend your asset and equipment lifetime up to 11%.

• Achieve 652% ROI by integrating UpKeep into your workflow

#6: Knowing When To Scale Your Business

An unexpected manufacturing challenge businesses may face is scaling. Think of your business like a garden. If you pick the produce too early or too late, the marketability and profit of your product will be diminished.

The risks of scaling your business too early include:

• Staff fatigue

• Financial strain

• Loss of quality

The risks of scaling your business too late may include:

• Market oversaturation

• Missed opportunities

• A competitive disadvantage compared to more established companies 

How UpKeep Can Help With Our Analytics & Reporting Feature

UpKeep provides clients with a reporting and analytics feature that tracks granular data and insights. We also help managers and executives gain a heightened awareness of operational and maintenance trends that affect asset health, inventory, and schedules. 

UpKeep’s analytics and reporting feature can aid you in accurately timing your upscale by helping you:

• Integrate your company’s tech stack to create a central knowledge base.

• Access graphs and reports to create a visualization of business needs.

• Monitor trends in cost, downtime, and labor.

• Track and analyze key metrics KPIs in real time to make data-driven decisions.

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#7: The Need for Automation

To the average citizen, automation wouldn’t seem like one of the biggest manufacturing challenges. Computers are designed to make things easier, right?

The biggest issue automation poses isn’t smooth operations and ease-of-use, but the cost of implementation. According to Camunda, roughly 37% of all automation projects fail due to costs. 

This implementation cost typically includes:

• Purchase

• Installation

• Training and;

• Modification of workflow

While the cost of automation may seem daunting, the rewards ensure two things:

1. Getting ahead in the competition

2. Saving money. 

According to Gartner, automation can save finance teams over 25,000 hours of work caused by human error. This translates to an estimated $878,000 of assets saved. Businesses can use the money saved to invest in other opportunities to expand their operations. 

How UpKeep Can Help With Our Asset Management Feature

As a business expands, it needs to keep up with its competitors. This means taking large orders and performing at peak operations to ensure the best customer outcomes. Without automated maintenance systems and asset management software, this can be a difficult feat.

But not with UpKeep. 

UpKeep’s CMMS software is designed to be far more rewarding in outcome than it is in implementation.

According to a report by Forrester Wave™, UpKeep helped a manufacturing company save $1.4 million and increase preventative work by 50% to avoid downtime costs.

Our services pay for themselves in terms of saving and efficiency. But if you’re not convinced, we provide prospective clients with a free 7-day trial before determining which plan along with product training you might be interested in.

UpKeep provides a range of packages varying in value and access to offer our automated services to clients no matter the budget. Learn more here.

#8: Inflation

In January 2022 the inflation rate hit a high of 7.5%. This value rode in on the coattails of a record score of 7.0% recorded in December. PxC Pulse Survey investigated manufacturing leaders’ opinions on the matter. They found that 68% of those polled believed inflation would remain high until the end of 2022. 

Those manufacturers were correct. 

By late June 2022, inflation rates increased to a heft 9.1%, the highest it has been in 40 years. Cost increase has hit manufacturers and businesses in all sectors even harder. In December 2022 the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for motor vehicle parts and equipment had a gain of 9.9%. 

How UpKeep CMMS Can Help Your Company Save Money

Organization and cohesiveness are key to cutting operational costs that are saddled with inflation. By managing your assets with UpKeep’s CMMS, you can:

• Ensure consistent cost records to track and cut spending as needed.

• Access a record of repairs to easily troubleshoot which parts are needed.

• Schedule routine maintenance to extend equipment lifetime by up to 11%.

• Avoid ordering parts you don’t need with an intuitive inventory management system.

• Streamline communication with unlimited free requesters with access to all necessary repair history and documentation.

UpKeep Is Here To Help Overcome Some of Your Greatest Manufacturing Problems

A biome will prosper under the exact conditions to ensure survival. The same goes for a business. 

That’s why UpKeep has designed software that acts like a digital ecosystem that helps businesses streamline operations and facilitate data-driven decision-making. Don’t let challenges in manufacturing pollute your business biome. 

UpKeep’s asset and maintenance operation toolset can give your team visibility across locations and assets to enhance cost/resource efficiency and productivity. With our CMMS you can:

• Ditch the paperwork

• Centralize asset documentation

• Make data-driven decisions

• Monitor assets remotely

• Integrate with other operations software to unify practices

• And more

Solve manufacturing issues and keep up with UpKeep.

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