EDITOR’S CHOICE
their workforce. But now the focus of UK manufacturers is shifting. According to recent reports, 38 per cent of UK manufacturing organisations plan to upskill their existing talent. Of the factories I visited, many are planning to integrate employee learning platforms in order to help enhance their workforce’s digital skills, and balance digital innovation with people-centric values. This is crucial for manufacturers to protect themselves in the long- term from the industry’s skills shortage. Across the factory floors, teams of data scientists, developers and AI specialists are being built to drive internal transformation. Through building these specialist teams, manufacturers can design purpose-built IT/OT platforms, shop floor apps and Product Lifecycle Manufacturing (PLM) systems to enhance their operations.
6. TOP-NOTCH CYBERSECURITY REMAINS A NON-NEGOTIABLE Following the major cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover (which saw their computer network shut down and cost the business over £196m in cyber- related costs), cybersecurity was a hot topic across the factories being judged.
As the manufacturing industry continues along its digital revolution, the level of cyber vulnerability is only increasing, and as a result, the need for robust cybersecurity measures has never been greater.
One of the key recognitions of many of the manufacturers visited was how factories can reduce the risk of cyberattacks while still progressing their digital innovation journey. Manufacturers cannot just delegate these cyber issues to their Security Operation Centre (SOC) teams, it takes a company-wide effort, starting with awareness for accountability by top management and then measures being put in place at every operational stage.
A SMARTER FUTURE FOR MANUFACTURING
The manufacturing industry is immersed in a digital revolution. Over the course of two years, it has progressed from experimentation to using mature, integrated digital innovations. UK manufacturers are now not only embracing digital technologies, but they are also becoming a key part of the business, with many manufacturers scaling them, embedding them, and many innovations are actively shaping the future of the industry. But here is my footnote to this smarter future. The manufacturers that will prosper in the next digital chapter of manufacturing will be those that keep cybersecurity and people at the forefront of all their decisions when choosing to adopt and scale these innovative technologies.
Columbus
www.columbusglobal.com
UKManufacturing Winter 2025/2026 F
THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS IS HUMAN-LED By Michael DeMaria, director of Product Management, Fluke Reliability
or 70 per cent of companies, the promises of digital transformation are falling flat. This is according to data from McKinsey on digital transformation and leadership goals. However, this sobering statistic is not due to any technological faults – rather businesses are failing to acknowledge their most valuable assets, their workers. Unless organisations focus on empowering these teams, no amount of tools and data will create meaningful change. Digital transformation is failing because leadership teams aren’t restructuring organisations to use this critical resource intelligently. Until human capability is redesigned to match system capability, transformation will remain surface-level, wasting investments and crippling the potential to achieve more.
THE BIRTH OF INDUSTRY 5.0 Industry 5.0 is shifting the established operating model for organisations. Instead of new technology replacing workers, smarter, more autonomous technology has made the human element even more vital. It is requiring us to move beyond the automation of Industry 4.0 into adaptive, resilient, and collaborative systems. It is redefining our entire value system. Instead of prioritising efficiency and control, it focuses on building a workforce of people capable of adapting when they receive new information. It is enabling employees to take intelligent actions grounded in context and collaboration with new ways to use the tools they have.
Without human capabilities, organisations stay rooted in Industry 4.0, favouring automation over integrated, human-led strategy. To stay competitive in an era of constant changes, organisations need to design and enable environments that empower workers, where insight, authority, and action are connected at every level.
Industry 5.0 is not about sidelining people. It is about making the loop more intelligent, distributed, and human-centric, empowering people to solve complex challenges better and faster than ever. But the need to act is urgent: delays in digital transformation erode competitiveness and squander investments. To unlock the value of digital tools, leaders must empower frontline teams with faster, decentralised decision-making. This shift enables workers to anticipate disruptions, minimise downtime, and act on real-time insights, replacing reactive firefighting with proactive strategies that drive efficiency and resilience.
BUILDING THE HUMAN-CENTRIC MODEL Across every domain, the risks are compounding. The growing skills gap is leading to a loss of institutional knowledge, increasing the need for intuitive, trustworthy systems that help people make sound decisions without expert oversight. Supply chain
volatility demands rapid, distributed responses and teams that are empowered to act, not just report. Regulatory pressure is intensifying the demand for traceability and human accountability. And rising cyber threats are making human oversight more critical than ever, as system compromises threaten not only data but operational continuity. Failure to adapt is failure to compete, but technology alone will not solve what are now deeply human and global challenges. Our attempts to centralise have resulted in bottlenecks that throttle progress and tie decision making up in red tape. Instead, we need distributed intelligence: empowered teams that are equipped with data and trusted to act on it. In this landscape, resilience depends on people enabled by tools, not replaced by them.
STEPS TO EMPOWERMENT There are three actionable steps leaders must take to eliminate the execution gap and empower their teams to act.
The first is building governance that enables velocity without compromising accountability, using clear guiding principles instead of bureaucratic approval processes. This empowers workers to make quick decisions while remaining aligned with organisational goals. It shifts the focus from asking for permission to acting with confidence, clarity, and shared responsibility. The next step is addressing the gap between data overload and actionable insight. This means investing in data storytelling, context-rich interfaces, and role- specific views that deliver the right information to the right people at the right time. When data is presented with clarity and purpose, it stops being noise and starts guiding meaningful action. The final step is to create models of collaborative intelligence that use data to enhance, not replace, human judgment and decision-making. Instead of trying to fully automate everything, use AI and data to support and amplify human reasoning in complex or uncertain situations. This type of reasoning is what humans do best, and by allowing people to focus on interpreting nuance, weighing trade- offs, and applying context, organisations can make better decisions faster, without sacrificing accountability or adaptability.
The future belongs to organisations willing to rethink what success looks like, shifting goals from efficiency to resilience, from oversight to enablement, and from alignment to autonomy. A truly human digital strategy means more than simply putting more workflows on screens. It’s a full transformation in how your organisation thinks, decides, and moves. Efficiency may keep you afloat, but resilience, agility, and growth will carry you forward.
Fluke Reliability
reliability.fluke.com
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