With few signs of an economic recovery on the immediate horizon, manufacturers will continue to do more with less in 2009, industry experts said today.
Technology budgets will not vanish, observers said, but moving forward the emphasis will not be on standard infrastructure upgrades, but instead on technologies that lower the cost of doing business.
With that in mind, industry experts are predicting that technology investments in 2009 will center on optimizing existing assets, right-sizing the supply chain, increasing sustainability efforts, and optimizing product lifecycle management and knowledge management.
The roadblocks have been well-documented. According to the Institute for Supply Management (ISM), the manufacturing sector failed to grow in December for the fifth consecutive month, and the overall economy contracted for the third consecutive month. In addition, new orders have contracted for 13 consecutive months and are at the lowest level on record, dating to January 1948. In addition, order backlogs have fallen to the lowest level since the ISM began its Backlog of Orders Index in January 1993. As a result, manufacturers are reducing inventories and shutting down capacity to offset the slower rate of activity, ISM reported last week.