72% of factory tasks are still performed by people. Unfortunately, Industry 4.0 is focused on machines.

Humans are not being displaced inside of factories nearly as rapidly as the headlines would have you believe.

In fact, humans are still manufacturing’s most important contributor of value. Drishti’s research with A.T. Kearney shows that 72% of manufacturing tasks are performed by human operators.

Unfortunately, most Industry 4.0 innovation is focusing on streams of data from robots, automation or other machine sources. Humans? Invisible.

There’s no reliable source of continuous data from people. The most common methodology remains the labor-intensive time-and-motion study. Which hasn’t materially changed since the time of Henry Ford.

Time-and-motion studies are a poor source of data. They’re performed manually, which means they produce minuscule sample sizes. And the very act of one person observing another introduces significant observation bias.

But manufacturers lack options. They have no choice but to make far-reaching decisions using bad data. Production, capacity, resource usage, hiring, and more—time-and-motion study data feed into all of them, with predictably negative consequences.

At the same time, this data gap hurts operators as well. How can operators demonstrate the value they’re creating to the company if their value can’t be measured?

Manufacturing faces a massive data gap: Manual activities are effectively invisible to analytics. This data gap that impacts both the business as a whole and the individuals on the floor.

One of the core tenets of lean manufacturing and the Toyota Way is continuous improvement. But how can that be achieved without continuous data?