Overview of Manufacturing Industries in Malaysia

Manufacturing industry produce finished goods on a large scale, employing various methods, tools, machines, and labour. This vast diversity of production goods leads to unique production processes, operating systems, production layouts, and monitoring systems for each product and industry. Understanding the complexities of each manufacturing sector is crucial to optimising operational efficiency, ensuring the production of high-quality goods, and enhance competitiveness within the manufacturing industry. This paper aims to gather basic information on local manufacturing industry, understand the manufacturing types used in the industry and identify common issues that occur in the participant’s manufacturing shop floor. Data was collected via online questionnaire using Google Form was conducted in November 2022 to assess the current approach of Malaysia's manufacturing industries, with about 56 participants participating. Data collected is then presented in table and graph including the demographic data. Common issues occur in shop floor can be allocated to 3 main group which is human issued, machine issues and system issues. It is evident that a significant portion of Malaysia's manufacturing industry still relies on human labour, with 80.4% of production lines being operated semi-automatically and 10% fully manually. The current manufacturing technologies also involve manual methods for tasks such as data recording, scheduling, and data storage. This reliance on human labour is notable despite the ongoing transition to Industry 4.0, which aims to revolutionize the manufacturing processes through automation and digitalisation.