The global demand for custom-made products is accelerating and many industries are not positioned to address the needs.[1] There are a few major obstacles that are causing the inability to meet demand, and these are inefficient and labor-intensive production methods, the absence of advanced and automated production technologies and worldwide there is a scarcity of skilled workers.
The absence of affordable, advanced, automated production technologies
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic showed that manufacturers are still heavily dependent on manual labor and do not have automated production lines. Manufacturers realized the need to switch to labor-replacing technologies and shift towards automating the production process and relying on more accurate methods to manufacture products. [2] Only now, industries are beginning to change the way their production line’s function. They are starting to automate their processes and in the first nine months of 2021, factories and industrial concerns in North America ordered a record 29,000 robots to alleviate the shortage of staff and take over the manufacturing process.[3] However, most production plants and companies are not able to shift so easily due to capital constraints and as a result they are still over reliant on traditional manufacturing methods.
Inefficient and labor-intensive production methods
In manufacturing, there are many repetitive, strenuous tasks which can cause physical strain for workers. This is problem because of fatigue. For example, the aerospace industry has zero tolerance for error and fatigue leads to workers making mistakes. This can result in creating faulty final products.[4] There is the need to protect a limited workforce from burnout and injury. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, manufacturing accounted for roughly 15% of nonfatal workplace injury and illness in 2019, with approximately 421,000 reported cases, more than a quarter resulting in multiple days away from the workplace.[5] There needs to be automated solutions that manufacture the products and will be able to do so perfectly without error in order to improve the current inefficient manufacturing methods.
Shortage of Skilled Labor
Custom-made production requires numerous manual skills, including measuring, drawing, cutting, welding, sanding, and finishing. These tasks rely on a high dependency on a skilled labor force. However, worldwide there is a massive shortage of skilled blue-collar workers. Blue-collar refers to workers who engage in hard manual labor, typically agriculture, manufacturing, construction, mining, or maintenance.[6] Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute projected that between 2018 and 2028, there could be as many as 2.4 million unfilled manufacturing jobs. That labor shortage would have an estimated $2.5T negative economic impact in the U.S.[7] This shortage of skilled laborers is extremely costly and a driving reason of the inability to meet consumer demand.
We at Largix believe that by reinventing traditional, labor intensive, design and production of custom-made products, it will be able to capitalize on the big problem that the manufacturing industry is facing and will be able to tap into a $XB opportunity.
[1] https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/manufacturing/future-of-manufacturing-industry.html
[2] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/a0361fec-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/a0361fec-en
[3] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/12/robots-jobs-staff-shortage-automation/
[4] https://www.aerospacemanufacturinganddesign.com/article/using-technology-to-make-the-most-of-worker-skills/
[5] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/osh.nr0.htm
[6] https://resources.workable.com/hr-terms/blue-collar-worker-definition
[7] https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/all-things-work/pages/the-blue-collar-drought.aspx
