By Hannes Botes, Chief Technology Officer, MANXiT.

Studies indicate that the role of South Africa’s manufacturing industry, in terms of contribution to the economy, reflects a sad tale of decline.  The sector was at the height of its powers in the 1980’s contributing nearly a quarter of the gross domestic product (GDP). However, by 2016, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators - it was said to add as little as 13% to the country’s GDP.

Many factors contribute to this including: insufficient funding - limiting growth; restricted access to research and development and unfavourable government policies that stifle start-up initiatives through taxation and labour laws. One problem that is often noted as one of the main causes of failure with manufacturing SMEs is IT.  Lack of experience, knowledge and downright confusion on how to use technology is a major issue.

When it comes to IT - many SMEs do not know what to do. To the untrained eye there appears to be a quagmire of constantly changing technology choices - making the right decision is nothing short of baffling.

Technology budgeting is also one of the biggest challenges in this arena.
So what is the silver bullet?
The answer is that SMEs don’t just need to rethink their IT strategy, they need to re-imagine it.
By outsourcing the management of IT SMEs can forget about having to manage day to day IT tasks and instead focus on core business issues and growing their organisations.  SMEs can look to technology specialists to overcome challenges by providing the latest trends in mobile; app development; cloud computing and more.

The rise of IT Management as a service (ITMaaS) has helped smaller companies to cope in a world of disruption.  Outsourcing technology needs has reduced dependency on physical, on premise, IT resources.
The emergence of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications has also proven to be an important development for this sector.  This model is financially more viable for budget constrained smaller enterprises and can be used to power everyday business functions including: accounting, invoicing; customer relationship management; data storage etc. SMEs are not in a position - from a financial or internal resource perspective - to upgrade technology frequently despite the fact that it is vital to do so to remain competitive; enhance productivity, customer service and reduce operation costs.

 
Many companies simply don’t possess the best in class skills required to manage all the elements of infrastructure and systems right across an organisation.  The value proposition of ITMaaS to the manufacturing sector is that it forms part of the broader SaaS world which is an increasingly attractive model for smaller companies in the midst of difficult economic conditions.
ITMaaS vendors provide the essential management tools that enable organisations to access and view an IT environment, monitor and evaluate performance, and ultimately improve the functionality of IT through a cloud delivery model.  Gaining visibility into an internal IT structure and delivering performance is a critical component within any company’s management process. Through ITMaaS offerings, enterprises are able to easily capture, analyse and monitor the risks, costs, capacity constraints and other performance metrics that help ensure the optimisation of IT resources. Moreover, ITMaaS brings the ability to monitor new technologies, in a seamless and time effective manner, as they are added to the stack.

Leveraging IT to deliver consistent, quality customer service and exceptional product manufacture, is pivotal to competitive advantage.

SMEs don’t have the big-business budgets to spend on data storage, backup and protection and often lack a reliable backup and disaster recovery plan. Subscription to a cloud/ITMaaS service can negate the worrying possibility of loss of data - a common technology challenge for SMEs.

In conclusion, lack of understanding and uptake of the latest technology remains a major bar to growth in SA’s manufacturing sector. This makes a powerful case for ITMaaS as it offers the prospect of globally competitive IT skills and services, as and when needed, leaving manufacturers to get on with running their businesses.