 Matt Weller Founder, Naviga Supply Chain Related links: Parliamentary Address regarding Supply Chain, SME Manufacturing and Productivity Parliament recommendation #1: National Reindustrialization Strategy Parliament recommendation #2: Realign investment and build executional knowledge This is part 3 of 3 expanding on recommendations I recently made to our Parliament around supply chains, small and medium manufacturing, and our national productivity challenges. Today I’ll talk about the need for an active, connected ecosystem for executives and leaders at small and medium manufacturing. So far, I’ve talked about the need for a reindustrialization strategy to provide coordination and focus within our manufacturing sector and our economy. And I’ve also talked about the need for changes in our education and funding models, to build executional knowledge and develop a focus on realized productivity as the primary measure of effectiveness.
But for either of these suggestions to work well, they need a feedback and adjustment mechanism within industry itself. There needs to be an active, connected ecosystem for our small and medium manufacturers where they can leverage group knowledge to solve common problems, preserving their individual time and resources to focus on competitive advantages. Or in other words, to prevent them from reinventing the wheel in disconnected silos. This bridge can serve to map, research and aggregate the needs of these manufacturers, along with the capabilities and capacities they represent (both in terms of production and employment), and provide that information in useful ways to industry groups to foster greater collaboration, alignment and focus on realized productivity gains. These groups are all critically necessary, but individually they have failed to change the downward trajectory of our national productivity. As such, it would be of critical necessity that such an ecosystem be industry led, independent from the influence of government and special interest groups, but at the same time be aware of the needs of our present and future population and our national sovereignty (30, 40, 50 years down the road) that only government has the vantage point to see beyond any individual industry. But just as individual industries cannot see the full view of our future needs, government cannot determine how it will meet those needs in isolation. So there is an opportunity for an active ecosystem to inform overarching national strategies and policy, with data, executional knowledge and most importantly, end customer feedback. I.e. employment, economics, and our population as the “market” to be served at a macro level at a breadth and scope that exceeds that of industry groups or government bodies. This is about finding out what our small and medium manufacturers need to be successful at the detailed levels (through enabling discussions, dialogue and learning between these companies), building that environment, and getting out of their way. Perhaps a simpler way to put it, an active connected ecosystem can become the glue that holds it all together in a functional fashion. We don’t have to look too far to learn how to build an active ecosystem. Canada’s tech sector has already built one, which has yielded a burgeoning tech sector that without this ecosystem, simply would not exist. Although as of late they too are experiencing challenges, because our lack of executional knowledge and our productivity crisis is not isolated to small and medium manufacturers, and as it turns out, funding scorecards do not correlate to successful businesses. But our manufacturing sector needs tech and innovation, and as such a revitalized manufacturing sector and reindustrialization strategy, can easily be a foundation on which tech can thrive and prosper in a symbiotic relationship to everyone’s benefit. A future that sees a manufacturing ecosystem equal to that of tech is a future that takes advantage of collaboration, builds east-west trade in addition to our traditional north-south trade patterns, and sustains real, measurable productivity growth and prosperity for all of our economic sectors, and for our population as a whole. Comments are closed.
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