UK manufacturers are outperforming other sectors in the economy in using data and analytics to inform decision-making, according to new research.
Manufacturing also had the highest rates of adoption of advanced analytics and AI to help interpret the data, an Opinium survey for data science consultancy Peak Indicators found, ahead of construction which was the next most data-intensive sector. But there is a sharp divide in the sector, with a third of manufacturers falling behind in their use of data.
The survey found that 21% of UK manufacturers had made data insight a core part of decision-making processes, compared with 16% of the overall business population. 14% of manufacturers had gone further and were backing up all their decisions with data, almost three times as many as the national average (5%).
And 15% of manufacturers said they had deployed predictive and prescriptive analytics across numerous processes, compared with a figure of 2% for the whole business population.
On the negative side, Peak Indicators’ research also found that a significant proportion of the industry was being left behind in the race to become more data-driven. Almost a third (30%) of manufacturers are still failing to collect or collate data systematically, while 38% currently make no use of analytics. Over half the manufacturers surveyed (54%) said they continued to rely exclusively on leaders’ intuition to inform most business decisions.
Peak Indicators managing director Kenneth Neilson said: “Large parts of the manufacturing sector have been transformed through industry 4.0 and smart factory investments, and many manufacturers are incorporating IoT technology into their operations to make even better decisions with real-time data. However, there is also a substantial data divide opening up between smart factories and the laggards, who are at risk of getting left behind by more agile competitors.”
He added: “The good news is that most manufacturers can become data-rich environments relatively quickly, which is a vital first step to helping them maintain their edge and develop new sources of competitive advantage.”
Opinium interviewed a sample of 500 senior decision-makers from UK-based companies about their data collection practices, use of analytics, and decision-making approaches between 3 – 10 February 2021.