Decision making is an important activity at the centre of every industrial business. Whether it’s deciding on how many products to manufacture, which countries to export to or the number of staff to deploy out in the field to maintain critical industrial assets – it all helps to power business efficiencies, compliance and growth. However, one of the significant challenges faced by these businesses is managing disconnected data.
The business landscape has changed dramatically since the pandemic. Companies have to navigate supply chain uncertainty, rising raw material costs, and rapid changes in customer demands. For the manufacturing sector in particular, there is also a growing skills ‘gap’. In the face of these uncertainties, being able to respond quickly and accurately is critical not only to competitiveness, but survival. Having an effective digital strategy in place that delivers actionable insights is the key to mitigating these disruptions. Trustworthy data is becoming the new currency in today’s increasingly digital marketplace.
Understanding the Disconnected Data Landscape
So, the aim of this survey on disconnected data commissioned by digital workflow leader, Intoware , is to better understand to what degree industrial businesses are data-informed? According to the Data Literacy Index, ‘to enable the democratisation of data to help businesses boost productivity, they must improve access, skills and the culture around data’. Thus, it’s these themes we have taken to provide the basis of this survey.
Businesses were asked if they see data as an asset and what the current challenges are to accessing data. They were also asked how confident they are using digital ‘tools’ and whether their work culture is driven by data or intuition. Finally, their plans to invest in data skills were covered. The aim is to help more businesses meet the challenge of becoming truly data-informed. This way, they can discover how to make the most of their data insights.
Intoware commissioned this independent survey on disconnected data from Surveygoo, of 1,030 UK based industrial businesses. This includes senior decision makers, managers, supervisors, frontline, IT and administration staff from the utilities, oil and gas, manufacturing, civil engineering, rail and transport and logistics sectors. With businesses sized from 1 to 5,000+ employees, the research was conducted on the 28th February to 3rd March 2022.