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You can’t meet the demands of a modern industrial workforce with outdated tools or disconnected systems.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.

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.

Industrial organizations have invested heavily in automation, analytics, and digital transformation. Yet one of the most critical data streams—the actions and decisions of frontline workers—has remained largely invisible. That changes today.