Nearly 58% of food and beverage manufacturers report declining productivity despite investing in workplace technology, primarily because new systems are introduced without changing underlying processes, creating duplicate work across systems and wasting employee time on manual tasks.
- 58.4% of food and beverage manufacturers believe their organization is becoming less productive despite continued technology investment
- 81.8% of employees spend over a quarter of their working week on repetitive or manual tasks, with 40.8% spending more than half their week on these activities
- 95.8% of respondents report work duplication across systems, teams, or processes, with 75.8% saying this occurs to a moderate or significant degree
- 76.4% of manufacturers introduce new technology without changing corresponding processes or ways of working, while 60% cite outdated processes or poor system integration as the biggest barrier
- Only 14.4% reported significant productivity improvement from AI implementation, while 41.8% said AI delivered no improvement or made work more difficult
Nearly six in 10 Australians working in food and beverage manufacturing (58.4%) believe their organization is becoming less productive, despite continued investment in workplace technology, according to new research commissioned by Argon & Co.
What’s more is, 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.
"Food and beverage manufacturers are investing in technology to improve productivity, but many employees are still spending too much time on manual admin, repeating checks or moving between different systems. 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," says Paul Eastwood, managing partner at Argon & Co.
Key takeaways:
· 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.
· Technology itself is only part of the challenge. 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 10 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.
· 82.4% say their organization had introduced AI only to a limited extent or not at all. 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.
· Almost two-thirds of respondents (63.2%) identified production, supply chain or inventory management as the areas offering the greatest opportunity to improve productivity. More than half (52.2%) said their top priority for technology was reducing repetitive tasks or eliminating errors and rework, while 30.4% nominated better planning and scheduling as their top priority.
