What do P5G for Manufacturing, Pets, and Funeral Homes have in common?

How to be recession resilient

Winter is coming

So, what do P5G for Manufacturing, Pets, and Funeral Homes have in common? The answer is recession resilience. Summer 2022, the world has been rocked by COVID-19, supply chain crisis, Suez Canal blockage, and the invasion of Ukraine – further disrupting energy supplies. Supply-side driven inflation has led to incremental increases in interest rates – in short, most analysts will tell you winter is coming – recession.
Studies based on the recessions of 2008 and 2001, including Harvard Business School, Deloitte, and MIT would indicate that the most resilient sectors to a recession are pet care, funeral homes, and subscription-based B2B infrastructure software, of which ASOCS’ Private 5G software, CYRUS®, is a prime example.
Conversely, one of the main industries to be hit by recessions is manufacturing – some more than others, but the consensus is that factories are recession sensitive. There are a number of measures analysts recommend to not only survive the upcoming recession but also thrive after. The interesting part is the crossover of manufacturing needs for durability/resistance and Private 5G.

How Manufacturing can be recession resilient

There are some key themes that are mentioned in studies across the board:

• Invest wisely in technologies and processes to increase flexibility and productivity
• Diversify supply chains while maintaining leaner and more efficient inventories
• Manage cashflow and debts – in particular, look at moving to subscription-based models rather than outright purchases
• Decision-making: leaders need to make, not just smart decisions, but fast decisions to navigate the storms

Predictably, studies also look at layoffs as an inevitability, but here the smart money is on trying to reduce the numbers while looking at making sure there is a sufficiently skilled workforce when coming out the other side. We also have more recent experiences to refer to, when looking at the global exit from Coronavirus. Headlines have been made in the summer of 2022 in the travel sector in particular as airlines and airports have struggled to fill positions leading to massive delays and cancellations of flights. Manufacturing already has a position fulfillment problem. In the US alone there are nearly 1 million unfilled positions that are set to rise to over 2 million by the end of the decade.

Increasing productivity per capita for fiscal requirements is just one of the challenges facing manufacturers today. Regardless of macroeconomics, most countries are demanding that manufacturers reach environmental targets. The need to adopt Industry 4.0 principles including automation and AI has become the number one direction globally.

How Private 5G is becoming a defense against recession

The cornerstone of achieving stable, reliable, and future-proof digital transformation and smart manufacturing is connectivity and here too there is a revolution happening with true Stand Alone Private 5G based on O-RAN principles as there is a drive for network connectivity to move from fixed speeds to reliable networks.

Let’s breakdown the last statement:

Stand Alone and O-RAN

We refer to an on-premises 5G network including vRAN and Next Generation 5G Core (NGC) housed on either the edge or local servers. Rather than go into the details, refer to our guides for more information. When deployed on the edge, the entire network becomes subscription-based, and elastic based on the particular capacity needs at any given time.

O-RAN makes every part of the network interoperable and interchangeable between vendors. This increases the number of potential vendors for Radio Units, Core, edge, and even vRAN. Advantages have already been seen with supply chain shortages in Radio Units and Servers where the flexibility of using multiple vendors and local vendors has mitigated long waiting times for orders of hardware.

This fits in with points one, two, and three of manufacturing recession resilience listed above.

The move from fixed speeds to reliable networks

ASOCS has written in the past articles touching on this subject such as Developing “outside the box”, which touched on the scalability with reliability, and Breaking the 10ms Barrier which looked at private network slicing between eMBB and URLLC and focused on reliable data and connectivity performance.

The key driver for smart manufacturing is the connectivity of devices to AI and analytics, plus interconnectivity and orchestration of devices. This is not just a function of optimized operations and productivity but a continual optimization. High-speed performance should be a given, but Private 5G offers not only seamless mobility but also reliability.

The “Private” part of Industrial 5G should be mentioned. Private means that the enterprise owns the bandwidth entirely based on the spectrum allocation by local governments. This ensures that the data does not travel through any public domain or 3rd party.

The reliability empowers decision-making – with real-time analysis available and seamless elasticity and mobility, decisions can be made accurately and quickly. This has already been seen in the adoption of “flexi-floors” where production lines are fluid and can be expanded or contracted to meet specific production needs effortlessly and seamlessly. For example, there are no cables to move when moving a robot from one line to another or tracks to be laid for guiding AGVs.

Thrive not survive

As we head towards uncertain economic times, the key decisions for manufacturers will be not only on survival but investing in the technology to enable them to thrive as we emerge from the other side. There is no doubt that digitalization will play a major role in this, and more so the vendors who can offer manufacturers flexibility, and scalability based on subscription business models.