We are currently experiencing a major paradigm shift from a focus on consumption to one on information. Digital technology is a powerful lever for reinventing decades-old models – which is both exciting and unsettling.
This concerns all areas of industrial companies: sales, R&D, production and management. But it also concerns the role of humans, which must now be redefined in these factories of the future, where creativity and continuous improvement exploit the fact that tasks with no added value can now be carried out by technology.
As digital technology allows us to model, design and explore virtually anything, our imagination and representations now become the limiting factors. Another major change is the shift from a volume approach to an economy of features and services throughout the client experience. We need to change all value propositions through real-time data sharing in the supply chain, transmission of information from the Internet of Things, customised service proposals, preventive maintenance, etc.
Competitiveness will no longer be achieved by lowering costs, but by differentiation, with the help of decision-support tools that integrate economic and financial aspects, social and environmental responsibility, client satisfaction and agility.
José Gramdi
Lecturer-researcher, head of the specialised master in “Performance and industrial transformation management“, Troyes University of Technology
Key figures
- €445 billion: annual French industry exports.
- 4%: share of industry in France’s GDP.
- 8 million employees (11% of the country’s workforce).
Sources : 2020 data France Industrie, Le Mag Eco, Ministry of the Economy
