Nearly six in ten Australians working in food and beverage manufacturing (58.4%) believe their organisation is becoming less productive, despite continued investment in workplace technology, according to new research commissioned by global management consultancy Argon & Co.

The survey of 500 people working across the sector found employees are still spending a considerable amount of time on manual and repetitive work. More than four in five respondents (81.8%) spend over a quarter of their working week on repetitive or manual tasks, while 40.8% said it takes up more than half of their week.

Almost all respondents (95.8%) said work is being duplicated across systems, teams or processes, with 75.8% reporting this happens to a moderate or significant degree. In practice, that can mean entering the same data into multiple systems, maintaining spreadsheets alongside enterprise platforms or manually reconciling production information.

Inefficiencies

Paul Eastwood, Managing Partner at Argon & Co, says technology alone won’t fix an inefficient process.

“If you introduce a new system without changing how the work gets done, you risk adding another layer of complexity rather than making people’s jobs easier,” he said.

More than three-quarters of respondents (76.4%) said new technology is typically introduced without also changing the corresponding processes, responsibilities or broader ways of working around it.

Six in ten identified outdated processes or poor integration with existing systems as the biggest barrier to getting more from technology, including 34% who said underlying business processes are never updated.

By comparison, only 14% identified a lack of leadership support as the biggest obstacle, suggesting the challenge is less about the appetite for new technology and more about how it is put into practice.

“Manufacturers won’t solve productivity challenges by adding another tool to an existing process,” Mr Eastwood said.

“Before introducing AI, businesses need to look at where work is getting held up, what could be done differently and where technology can genuinely make the job easier. Otherwise, there’s a risk of using AI to speed up processes that weren’t working well in the first place.”

AI adoption

Much of the sector is still in the early stages of AI adoption, with 82.4% saying their organisation had introduced AI only to a limited extent or not at all. The reported impact on productivity was also mixed. More than two in five respondents (41.8%) said AI had delivered no noticeable productivity improvement or had made their work more difficult, while only 14.4% reported a significant productivity boost.

The mixed results suggest that introducing AI does not automatically translate into improved productivity. Even when the technology works as intended, its impact can be limited if it does not have access to the right information, fit into how employees actually work or address a clear business need. 

For more information on how manufacturing businesses can gain productivity improvements with AI, read Argon & Co’s latest whitepaper: Closing the AI Ambition Gap.