Engineering

Is sustainable growth the key to manufacturing’s

millennial future?
The manufacturing sector needs to prioritize sustainable innovation to attract the
millennial workforce

Jaydeep Saha
Global Reporter, HCLTech
October 26, 2023
9 minutes read
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There’s no doubt millennials are changing the look and feel of the current work culture
across industries — taking over leadership roles and set to enter the c-suite in the next
seven years.
However, success with this generation is not uniform. A 2019 survey shows there’s one
sector the millennial workforce is reluctant to experiment in and finds rather boring:
Manufacturing.

Compared to just 68% of millennials, the survey found that 86% of baby boomers and
Gen-X agreed that manufacturing jobs make a difference to the economy.

Millennial and workforce concerns

Skills, rigidness with the older generation, the kid-glove treatment, generational
dichotomy, pay, sustainable ways of working and being open to change — especially,
automation and ways to act with new skills — are some of the key areas that need to be
addressed to attract millennials.

With the change of perception and a shift in the industrial culture that’s forging a
sustainable path forward, Forbes reported that DayGlo — the world's largest
manufacturer of daylight fluorescent pigments — now allows flexible, remote work for
administrative positions, with many at the plant opting to four 10-hour shifts as well.

This helps to create a better work-life balance, which is what millennials want in the
workplace, according to a CBRE survey. This contradicts the millennial view of the
manufacturing sector as “tedious” and “boring.”

Tedious, you know now. But how can boredom be removed? Millennials are tech-savvy
and this is where AI-powered new-age and transformative and sustainable jobs are
gradually taking over the manufacturing sector, making it much more efficient and with
better control quality.

The survey also found that 62% of millennials would ideally prefer “changing jobs as
infrequently as possible,” provided roles challenge them, show significant career growth
and provide opportunities to upskill and reskill.

However, these sets of priorities do not bind their loyalty to any organization. Finding
better opportunities in this digital age, especially if a new role — where AI plays a major
role in a sustainable way — allows a remote working environment and a free space to
be creative, away from the collaborative workspace or workplace clamor, is also much
desired.
Millennials can’t be blamed after all. Technology has proven in the last five years that a
collaborative work environment can even be created while working remotely and
connecting through collaboration tools, extended reality or a digital twin presenting a
replica of the shop floor of a factory.

In such a smart factory, now AI is changing the production processes with analytical
capabilities of humungous data, real-time decisions and automation. Mostly, AI is being
used in predictive maintenance, quality control, process optimization, supply chain
management, better decision-making and collaboration between humans and robots.

By 2030, there will be at least 300 million more people aged 65. According to a
McKinsey report, this is set against the backdrop of the upcoming workforce transition
with AI automation taking over many areas, requiring 75-375 million people who are
likely to switch occupations and learn new skills.

Interestingly, the report added that factors like development of technologies, renewable
energy, energy efficiency and climate adaptation, would give rise to new jobs that
require new skills.

Some of the new skills are giving rise to a variety of jobs across industries including the
manufacturing sector. Here AI product managers, AI research scientists, robotic
engineers, big data engineers, business intelligence developers, computer vision
engineers, software engineers, data scientists, machine learning experts and natural
language processing engineers are creating the differences in a much more sustainable
way if compared to the past.

Is sustainable growth the answer?

“From the earliest days of the pandemic, consumers around the world said that they
planned to make more sustainable choices about how they spend their time and their
money. Many people are willing to pay more for products and services that reflect their
specific beliefs. We found consulting data and preliminary research in this domain that
shows consumers are looking beyond the brand to consider sustainability across an
organization’s full value chain,” says Shevy Magen, Corporate Innovation Leader &
Partner - Digital Re-Invention, Avasant at the Tech2Sustain discussion on sustainable
consumerism.

“We think this opens the doors for many companies to create products or solutions that
reflect the nuanced concerns of their target customers. The demand is not yet there
with millennials, but we expect it to grow exponentially over the coming generations,”
adds Magen.

It’s estimated that the global manufacturing sector accounts for one-fifth of global
carbon emissions and 54% of the world’s energy usage.

Building a more sustainable business — a key priority for millennials — through

sustainable engineering for manufacturers offers a path forward.

“A few of the imperatives that sustainable engineering practices can impact include
bringing out energy-efficient products, product optimization, recyclable materials,
circular design, sustainable packaging, optimal usage of resources for manufacturing
and operations, sustainable supply chain and ecosystem, product lifecycle
assessments, including less CO2 emissions and supporting a greener planet,” says
Prasanna Oruganti, Associate Vice President, Industrial Manufacturing, ERS, at
HCLTech.

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Industry NeXT

While millennials are concerned about climate change and the way the planet is
deteriorating every day due to manmade disasters and the use of fossil fuels, they look
forward to utilizing new technologies to drive sustainability initiatives in industries like
manufacturing.

At this juncture, Industry NeXT — HCLTech’s forward-looking industry framework — is

helping customers become expansive, adaptive and future-proof, irrespective of their
industries or technology adoption maturity.

This is because Industry NeXT enables businesses, including those where millennials
are at decision-making positions, to experiment beyond just operational efficiency at
scale with accelerated speed. The framework takes the Industry 4.0 capabilities as its
baseline to enable enterprises to transform industrial operations into resilient,
sustainable and experience-driven, create new revenue models and value streams by
evolving products and services and eliminate the digital silos through security and
network convergence.
Sustainable engineering keeps the environment in mind, while latest technologies,
including IoT, AI, digital twin and cloud, are stitched in such a way that stakeholders are
well-informed of the benefits from shop floor to top floor.

The four key drivers of the Industry NeXT ecosystem are data intelligence, compute
smart, embracing convergence and micro capability. This integrated ecosystem
connects people, stakeholders, enterprises, operations, products, services, data and
assets with a digital thread to rethink the entire value creation process and reinvent
customer experiences.

“The Digital Manufacturing pillar of HCLTech Industry NeXT brings many opportunities
for the manufacturing industry to meet evolving business needs. Leveraging digital
thread, digital twins, intelligent sensors, cobots and 5G will enable next-generation
manufacturing enterprises to create a data-driven connected factory backed by a solid
IT/OT architecture with complete autonomy over manufacturing equipment, operations
and product attributes,” says Ralf Schulze, Associate Vice President, Manufacturing
(IoT WoRKS™), at HCLTech.

For example, a global manufacturer of machine parts and tools with more than 150
connected manufacturing factories worldwide needed them to seamlessly work together
and be integrated into a global physical supply chain and a digital ecosystem.

Leveraging cloud as a technology and Industry NeXT’s capabilities, the benefits the
customer received included a 30% reduction in operation costs, 40% reduction in major
incidents, 99% adherence to major KPI’s and SPI’s and 40% reduction in TCO with
AI/ML base automation.

The customer was also able to achieve 10% reduction in water and electricity
consumption for its core manufacturing operations as well as data centers. The
real-time data powered intelligence powered by AI also helped the customer advance
on their sustainability aspirations.

As manufacturing companies strive for resilience, this sustainably transformed digital

ecosystem — with smart manufacturing services powered by AI — can enable modern
manufacturing companies to discover transformational business potential through this
cognitive and secured ecosystem.