Blog

Are U.S. Manufacturers in Retreat?

In the U.S., manufacturers are pulling back on costly new-build projects, but does this mean that they are in retreat? Not so, says new research from SalesLeads. Instead, manufacturers are retrenching and reinventing themselves. In New Industrial Manufacturing Planned Projects Drop 36% in January 2023 from Previous Month, SalesLeads states while 111 new projects were announced, this is a significant decrease from the month previously. In addition, manufacturers are focusing almost as much on expansions (51) and renovations (53) as new projects.

It’s no surprise to manufacturing leaders and the vendors that support them that this year’s focus is on containing costs and improving operational efficiency. The heady customer demand that occurred during the pandemic has been followed by rising material and labor costs, harming manufacturer margins.

As a result, manufacturers are pausing or downscaling major infrastructure projects and focusing investments on solutions that can provide rapid ROI. Leaders want to solve entrenched problems, such as equipment reliability, product quality, and operational throughput.

QAD Redzone helps manufacturers thrive in any economic climate by harnessing frontline teams’ ability to solve production problems and deliver transformation programs. Large and small manufacturing teams around the world that deploy the QAD Redzone Connected Workforce Solution achieve overall equipment effectiveness gains of 14 points and productivity increases of 29% in just 90 days. With these results, it’s easy to create workforce excitement and momentum for building world-class continuous improvement cultures.

The QAD Redzone Way is a unique combination of social/mobile technology resulting in a connected workforce solution. When paired with a highly immersive coaching program, QAD Redzone drives behavior change to make the uplifts stick.

The solution provides out-of-the-box functionality, such as dashboards, leaderboards, actions, issues, alerts, chats, logs, and blogs, which provide summarized content for structured meetings and forums. Together, these resources contribute to creating a powerful communication and collaboration platform for monitoring, documenting, reporting, analyzing and driving CI results.

QAD Redzone creates an action-oriented environment where frontline workers are armed with the tools and support they need to make decisive and timely decisions at the point of activity: on the shop floor.

Want to learn more? Download the QAD Redzone 2023 Productivity Benchmark Report.