Today's manufacturing challenges demand integrated systems. As current events in the world unfold, the manufacturing industry is seeing rapidly changing demand, falling capacity to meet demand, and supply bottlenecks that have become difficult to predict and manage. On top of all of this is the global economic downturn, which impacts many manufacturers and suppliers today and for the foreseeable future.
Manufacturing output decreased by 0.4% in February 2020, following a 1% drop in the previous month. It marks the eighth straight month of annual declines in factory activity in the U.S. Also, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, over the last decade, the number of manufacturing jobs has steadily declined. In March 2020, average weekly hours fell by 0.3 hours for all manufacturing workers and by 0.3 hours for production employees. The skills gap is also widening in manufacturing and is expected to cause losses of $454 billion in manufacturing GDP by 2028.
Succeeding in the manufacturing industry under the present constraints and future uncertainty requires precision, efficiency, and sustainability for delivering high-quality products on time. This challenge is best supported by a properly designed open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. The business system automates and streamlines various tasks ranging from the shop floor to the administrative desk. Advances in open source manufacturing technologies allow a process to be performed with minimal human assistance. These technologies are addressing the labor shortage and falling job growth in manufacturing.
All of the above challenges create an opportunity to advance productivity initiatives and manufacturing efficiencies, thus enabling higher quality work and increased throughput, with less workforce capacity. The integration and automation of manual, costly, time-consuming, and repetitive tasks allow fewer workers to complete more work, which contributes to a manufacturer's competitive advantage.
Because of its many benefits, open source adoption for manufacturing automation and IT infrastructure is sweeping across the industry. Open source software is any type of program or application that developers can inspect, copy, modify, and redistribute. It is software that is publicly accessible and allows exchanging code and ideas in a transparent and collaborative manner. Open source software gives manufacturing businesses the flexibility they need to solve a wide range of problems.
The open source software services industry is set to exceed $17B in 2019 and expected to reach nearly $33B by 2022, according to CB Insights' market sizing tool. Today, more than 30 million developers contribute to community-based open source software platforms like Gitlab, Github, and others.
Open source licenses dictate how the software can be used, outlining different policies for modifying and redistributing the source code. It is common for open source software publishers to release a license that is already approved by the Open Source Initiative and popular with the community.
Manufacturing ERP is the integrated management of main business processes, often in real-time and mediated by software and technology. Open source ERP for manufacturing has played a huge role in managing overall productivity and growth in manufacturing enterprises over the last decade. By combining open source software with the advantages of ERP, a myriad of manufacturing business processes can be integrated together, saving time and expense. Manufacturing decision-makers can react to changes faster and with fewer errors, as more data becomes visible across the organization. They can take control of their supply chain to deliver products faster, with fewer resources, and at a lower cost.
