How technology on the factory floor is driving manufacturing’s next leap

Technology has become part of how modern businesses operate. The more difficult question for business leaders is deciding where they can create meaningful value.

Every year brings new tools, platforms and applications that promise to make businesses faster, more efficient and more competitive. Keeping up with all of them is neither practical nor necessary. What matters is understanding the problems within the business that technology can genuinely help solve and having a clear way to measure whether it has made a difference.

That means technology decisions belong directly in executive and strategic discussions. They dictate how work gets done, how choices are framed, how capital and human resources are deployed, and how rapidly an organisation can pivot. While technical teams lead implementation, deployment decisions must remain tightly aligned with overall business priorities.

The most pragmatic starting point is operational diagnosis: Where is time being lost? Where are decisions constrained by limited data? Which processes introduce unnecessary friction or cost? Addressing these concrete pain points provides a far stronger foundation than selecting a technology and searching for a problem to solve.

This problem-first philosophy guides our digital strategy at UAC of Nigeria PLC and the 1879 Tech Hub. For instance, our deployment of SAP S/4HANA strengthens operational controls, enhances efficiency, and provides real-time visibility across the end-to-end supply chain. In 2025, we executed an upgrade and cloud migration that significantly reduced infrastructure costs and laid the groundwork to integrate CHI Limited’s enterprise platforms into our unified architecture.

At 1879 Tech Hub, that approach can mean building a solution when a specific business need calls for it, or harnessing existing technologies when they can address the problem effectively. We have developed tools including Legal Compass for legal operations, SalesUp for route-to-market visibility, Ops Shield for safety and compliance, and Proc360 for procurement. We also harness technologies such as computer vision and machine learning through Factory AI to give teams greater visibility across the production floor, helping them identify safety violations, quality defects and operational inefficiencies earlier and respond more quickly. 

Successful adoption depends on more than the technology itself. Leadership needs to be clear about the business outcome, teams need to understand how a new system affects their work, and the organisation needs the skills and processes to sustain it. This becomes particularly important as AI and other advanced technologies become more widely used. A highly capable system has limited value if the people expected to use its output cannot understand it or apply it appropriately to the business context. 

For organisations beginning their technology journey, this means resisting the pressure to do everything at once. A focused use case, a clear business objective and a way to measure the outcome provide a stronger foundation for scale. Once a solution has demonstrated value, the business has something tangible to build on, whether that means extending it to another production line, applying the learning to another function or addressing a different problem. 

For African enterprises, this disciplined methodology is particularly urgent. Companies across the continent navigate unique operating environments characterised by fragmented supply networks, diverse consumer segments, and infrastructure variability—demanding targeted, highly scalable technology investments.

The pace of technological change will continue to increase. Business leaders will have to make decisions about AI, automation, data and other emerging technologies while balancing competing priorities and assessing which solutions are genuinely relevant to their businesses. The opportunity lies in building the discipline to first understand the problem, test technology against it, measure the outcome, and use what works to make the next decision. That is how technology moves from being another business investment to becoming a practical driver of better performance. 

David Asama Dogeni is a technology executive and innovation leader with over 15 years of experience driving enterprise-wide digital transformation across diverse industries. He currently serves as Senior Vice President of Technology and Head of the 1879 Tech Hub at UAC of Nigeria PLC, where he leads strategic initiatives that embed technology at the core of business operations, enabling sustainable growth and long-term competitive advantage.