In 2018, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made this very insightful remark at Davos: “The pace of change has never been this fast, and it will never be this slow again.”

While this holds true in normal times, it is especially true in the middle of a pandemic.

COVID-19 has upended a whole host of sectors, including the entire hospitality industry, live events, and most industries which require person-to-person contact, such as beauty parlors and hair dressers.

Meanwhile, other sectors have never been busier. Those firms which enable working from home such as Zoom, and home delivery services like Amazon, have seen their valuations skyrocket.

One overlooked sector, of course, is manufacturing. Because things still need to be manufactured, manufacturers must innovate to stay alive in an industry that is constantly changing. For instance, how do manufacturing employees work from home? Is that even a viable option when making physical products? Do these firms have the right technology in place to maintain productivity and profitability?

The answer is, sometimes yes, and sometimes no. Over five years ago, Unionwear embraced new technologies such as cloud mobile ERP and MRP, which made our work significantly more productive, so we were more prepared than others. We figured out how to have a number of manufacturing employees working from home while COVID was at its peak so we could avoid production disruptions. We innovated and developed a full line of PPE products in a matter of weeks. And we came up with innovative ways to avoid disruptions to our supply chain.

For me, there are two big lessons to learn from this. One, manufacturers who embrace innovation will stay in business in the short-run and become more profitable and efficient in the long-run. Two, there is a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurs to assist manufacturers in embracing innovation, both from a consulting side and deploying hardware and software solutions.

We are in the middle of unprecedented challenges and an equal number of opportunities. If manufacturers want to stay profitable in the long-run, they must embrace innovation.