Across every sector of manufacturing, one theme has become impossible to ignore: the workforce is changing faster than most organizations are prepared for. As a generation of experienced workers retires, they take with them over 161,000 years of institutional knowledge, leaving leadership teams racing to onboard, train, and support the next wave of frontline employees. This isn’t just a labor challenge—it’s an operational one.

You can’t meet the demands of a modern industrial workforce with outdated tools or disconnected systems. That’s where Webalo comes in.

In my many years at Webalo as Manager of Customer Success and Implementation, I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with a wide range of industrial companies — from discrete manufacturers and CPG giants to food processors and chemical producers. Each has its own unique challenges, but what they all have in common is a drive to modernize operations, empower their frontline teams, and improve visibility across the enterprise.

Among these, bottling and perishables manufacturers face particularly intense pressure. Short shelf lives, high throughput expectations, strict safety requirements, and constant demand fluctuations make their supply chains especially complex. In this blog, I’ll share the top eight supply chain challenges we see time and again in this space — and the strategies leading manufacturers are using to overcome them.

Why Workforce Data Must Be Part of Industrial Data Management for Smart Manufacturing

In the race toward smart manufacturing, IT and OT data convergence has become a cornerstone for digital transformation. As industry leaders strive to contextualize industrial data to unlock predictive and prescriptive insights, the foundational work of data management frameworks, such as those detailed by Gartner**, cannot be overstated. These frameworks offer a structured approach to gathering, tagging, and contextualizing machine and process data, creating a data backbone for advanced analytics.