ANZ Industry Is Flying Blind: New Report Exposes the Visibility, Workforce and AI Gaps Costing Operations Leaders Millions
Only 9% of Australian organisations report high supply chain visibility - yet downtime costs up to A$349,000 per hour and AI adoption is accelerating faster than most can manage
Mastering SAP, in partnership with SAPinsider, today released The State of Supply Chain, Enterprise Asset Management and Procurement in ANZ, 2026 - a meta-analysis report revealing that Australia and New Zealand's industrial sectors face their most complex operating environment in a generation, with cost pressure, workforce shortages, supply chain disruption and AI transformation converging at once.
The finding that cuts across every sector: most ANZ organisations are investing in transformation while still lacking the data, visibility and workforce foundations to execute it.
Disruption Is the New Normal
Nearly half of Australian industrials (47%) reported active supply chain disruptions in 2025, yet only 9% report high supply chain visibility. At the same time, 68% of supply chain professionals cite rising costs and inflation as their primary concern, and international trade and tariffs have entered the top three challenges for the first time. Despite the headwinds, 44% of manufacturers are raising resilience investment in 2026 and 54% plan to increase automation spend - signals that the sector is responding, if not yet ahead of the curve.
Asset Management: The Cost of Inaction
For asset-intensive operators across mining, energy, utilities and infrastructure, the financial argument for predictive maintenance has become impossible to ignore. When unplanned downtime costs up to A$349,000 per hour and maintenance already consumes approximately half of mining operating expenditure, the gap between reactive and predictive approaches translates directly to the bottom line. Yet fragile data foundations and disconnected systems remain widespread - leaving organisations absorbing avoidable costs while the market around them accelerates. While Australia's EAM market is growing at 18.2% CAGR and the predictive maintenance sector is expected to reach USD 1.62 billion by 2033, it doesn’t necessarily translate into organisational readiness.
Workforce: The Constraint That Underlies Everything
Technology investment alone will not close the gap. In mining, demand for workers is outstripping the supply pipeline - difficulty recruiting and retaining skilled employees is reported by 86% of executives, and engineer positions have more open roles than filled (just 42% are filled). Across manufacturing, the digital transformation agenda is being slowed by the very shortage it depends on solving - robotic engineers, data analysts and maintenance technicians are the hardest roles to fill, and the hardest to replace. With 35,400 new mining jobs projected by 2028 and the trades workforce ageing, the workforce needed to run tomorrow's operations does not yet exist at scale. Digital tools are not a preference; they are the only viable path forward.
Procurement and AI: Ambition Ahead of Execution
Half of Australian procurement professionals already use AI, and 76% of organisations globally report AI-driven performance improvements of 25% or more. Yet procurement workloads are expected to grow 8 to 10 percent in 2026 while budgets remain flat. The shift underway is from automation - doing existing tasks faster - to orchestration: coordinating decisions, data and workflows across the entire source-to-pay lifecycle.
"Every data point in this report points to the same conclusion. The gap between ambition and execution is wide - and measurable in millions of dollars per year,” said Annette Slunjski , CEO at Mastering SAP.
“Luckily leaders and managers in asset-intensive and supply chain heavy organisations have a community of like minds within Mastering SAP for support and to learn what the most innovative of their peers are doing to meet these challenges.”
Access the full report here.
