Key Benefits of this Study: Identify key business objectives in this industry and industry challenges • Discover IT investment opportunities to address these objectives and challenges; find technologies that have been proven to reduce costs and generate revenue Benchmark with competition and other industry leaders • Learn new ways to improve customer experience • Determine successful strategies to develop and retain a best-in-class workforce • Facilitate your digital transformation journey The overall research objective is to measure the current use and future decision making behavior toward information technology (IT) around the globe in the Manufacturing industry, specifically: Enterprise Mobility Management, Digital Commerce, Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC), Infrastructure and Data Centers, Cloud Communications, Analytics, Digital Marketing Solutions, Customer Experience Management, Cyber Security, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Blockchain (DLT), and Enterprise Information Management. Frost & Sullivan aims to: • Understand the IT-related challenges organizations face today • Monitor the status of digital transformation • Assess the current and future use of business communications technologies • Evaluate factors that drive investments in communications technologies • Gauge IT and communications trends Manufacturing has been one of the most negatively impacted industries by the Covid-19 virus. The challenges that this industry was already facing have been amplified and new ones have emerged, making investments in digital solutions crucial to survive the next year. Safety standards now include social distancing, making production even more costly, especially for high-touch assembly lines. Travel has been limited for product managers, making quality control, and speed of production difficult. A major challenge in this industry has been building trust among all parties in the supply chain. Existing approaches cannot keep up with increasing customer demand due to the shift to on-line purchasing, which requires delivery to the door. In addition, production is often being shifted to make essential goods. Improving customer experience was a top priority pre-Covid-19 as the need to meet customers’ demand for faster product delivery and quicker/better customer service became vital to gain a competitive edge. With more urgent matters taking precedence at the current time, this will be a lower priority. However, early adopters of transformative technologies are already gaining a competitive advantage; so this goal still needs to be top of mind. With the right technologies in place, many of these obstacles can be tackled. This study covers the benefits of transformative IT/telecom technologies. • Respondents ranked improving customer experience (CX) and satisfaction (42Percentage), improving operational efficiencies (41Percentage), and launching of new products and services (40Percentage) as the top three business objectives for 2020. IT/Telecom investments in CX is a top priority as well, although this may slip in ranking in the near term due to other Covid-19 essential needs. •Among transformative technologies, IoT is used by 68Percentage of the respondents followed by AI (63Percentage), and blockchain (51Percentage). About 9Percentage of respondents are not using any of these solutions. • Improving the quality of products and services is the top reason for investments in IoT and AI. The cost of integration of these technologies is a main obstacle. • Blockchain is expected to improve operational efficiencies, both internally and externally. The complexity of developing this solution is the top barrier. • Investments in digital solutions will be accelerated so that manufacturing companies can survive the massive losses resulting from Covid-10 and to better manage future disruptions. • Moving applications and databases to the cloud will be a key strategy over the next two years. Standards and policies in manufacturing operations can be synchronized in plants located in different countries. This will enable manufacturers to be more flexible and agile and take advantage of continuously updated and secure networks. This also allows companies to track data remotely and share information across the organization as well as with customers, distributors, and suppliers.