2025 Manufacturing Outlook: Pavel Bosovik

Deloitte Insights predicts talent attraction and retention will be the top concern for manufacturing in 2025. Do you agree?
That’s definitely going to be our No. 1 and probably my only challenge that I will be dealing with all of next year is attracting good talent and then retaining existing talent. It’s hard. It takes a toll on you, both emotionally and professionally speaking. I don’t know if I have an answer on how to deal with it. We’ve expanded our benefit packages in the last 12 months – double. We’ve gone as far as started offering benefits that big companies like Google offer. A wellness day, so if you’re feeling stressed out, with no prior notice you can just take a paid day off. We’ve offered and added to our benefit packages life insurance, and we’ve increased how much we match for our IRA retirement plans. But it just seems like it’s an incremental impact. I think the times that we live in ... have made it really challenging. I love the quote that “good times make weak people,” and the last 10 years we’ve had some really good times and the fruit of that is a lack of a strong pool of qualified candidates.

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to enact a sweeping set of tariffs as he takes office, with manufacturing being among the industries impacted. How do you see tariffs impacting manufacturing as we head into the new year?
An industry like ours, where a lot of our products are made here in the U.S., we won’t see a large impact. But manufacturing as a whole – everyone that does have business overseas – it will have, in most cases, a negative impact, in some cases, a positive impact. I know a handful of manufacturers, even one of them here locally, can’t disclose their name, but they had manufacturing in China, they brought it here to Springfield, Missouri, and so they won’t feel an impact on it. I think it just depends on the space that you’re in. Some of our competitors buy parts from overseas, and so it’ll really hurt them.

How will artificial intelligence impact the manufacturing industry in 2025?
AI has been pivotal. All of our managers have gone through training and now use it on a daily basis. It’s taken people that don’t have a bachelor’s degree to sound and operate on a master’s level just in their communications and emails. Prior to this, you’d draft up an idea, you’d take time to write it up, you’d send it to the attorneys, three weeks later, two, three drafts later, you’d have something. It took up so much time. Now, you can have a high school dropout, that we train up, and using it can draft up a policy that is compliant with both legal precedent and compliant with what the company vision is, and within a couple of minutes have a phenomenal policy that’s probably superior to what any attorney can draft up in a moment’s notice. It is definitely changing the space and more so our space. We’re still in preliminary phases, but we’re working on incorporating it into our actual products. We’re probably still two to three years out from that.

What’s the status of the industry’s supply chain resilience?
I think, in general, it’s significantly improved compared to what it was during the pandemic just a couple years ago. It could still definitely improve. The important thing in supply chain is, right now, we’re in somewhat of a recession, so there’s a surplus. My concern is the surplus has created a gap, so when the tide turns and the economy starts booming again, that we’re really going to see some challenging supply chain issues because I don’t think we have the infrastructure for a booming economy.