Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO, QAD|Redzone. Works with manufacturers to help frontline teams move faster and make better decisions.
I spend most of my time on plant floors. The biggest concern I hear from a CEO in a conference room and from a plant manager on the line is usually the same problem in two vocabularies. The CEO calls it margin. The plant manager calls it Tuesday.
While manufacturers have technology and capital, that’s not enough to solve their current concerns. I’ve found that the issues generally arise from lacking people, consistency and time. Solving those constraints will decide which American manufacturers pull ahead over the next few years, and no purchase order fixes them.
The workforce math runs opposite to the fear.
The public argument about automation assumes the problem is too few jobs. The data says it’s too few people.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 580,000 open manufacturing jobs in July 2026, which was a preliminary figure. Likewise, Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute projected in a 2024 study that the industry could need as many as 3.8 million workers by 2033, with as many as half of the skilled openings, roughly 1.9 million, going unfilled.
If you are managing for a labor surplus that is not coming, you will keep trying to hire your way out of a gap that hiring cannot close.
The more useful question is what your best people spend their day doing. In most plants, the answer is retrieval rather than judgment: chasing a number, keying something in twice.
That ratio is a staffing decision, so before you post another requisition, spend one shift beside your most experienced operator and split the minutes into those two columns.
Your costs are moving faster than your plan.
In the National Association of Manufacturers’ second-quarter 2026 outlook survey, 83.1% of respondents named rising raw material costs among their top business challenges, up from 57.5% one quarter earlier. Trade uncertainty, including actual and proposed tariffs, was named by 71.8%.
The number underneath is the one I would put in front of a board. Manufacturers in that survey expect input costs to rise 5.8% over the next twelve months, while raising their own prices only 4.2%. By their own forecast, they plan to absorb more cost than they can pass along.
You cannot control tariff policy, but you can control how fast your operation addresses it. Against that spread, the margin you keep turns on how quickly the plan moves. A supplier switch that reaches the schedule in two days protects the quarter. Three weeks later, it does not.
So when a duty lands or a supplier moves, count the days until your plan reflects it. The exposure on your books is not the tariff rate but the lag in response.
The pilot problem is a consistency problem.
McKinsey’s 2026 State of AI survey, published in August, found 44% of organizations now report AI scaling across the enterprise, up from 38% a year ago. Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed attribute at least some positive EBIT impact to AI. But the share McKinsey classifies as high performers, attributing 5% or more of EBIT to AI and calling the impact significant, has stayed flat at about 6%.
Meanwhile, Gartner’s forecast in June 2025 that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, citing unclear business value and cost.
In manufacturing specifically, Rockwell Automation’s 2026 State of Smart Manufacturing report found that, despite collecting growing volumes of data, only 43% of the data manufacturers collect is being used effectively. It is a vendor’s survey, but it matches what I see in the field.
Almost none of the stalled projects I have looked at failed technically. Instead, the process underneath was inconsistent enough that nobody trusted the output. In one case, two experienced people had run the same situation two different ways, both of which were defensible, and the system learned from both, so its answers contradicted each other.
Test for that directly. Pick one decision made every day on your floor, a changeover sequence or a quality hold, and ask two of your best people how they would handle it. If their answers differ, fix that before you buy anything.
Waiting for the big program is the expensive choice.
Nearly every manufacturer I meet has a modernization program on a roadmap somewhere, and a quiet understanding that improvement waits behind it.
This instinct has been earned through experience. ERP replacements were genuinely slow and disruptive, so plants stayed on systems that were good enough and layered customizations on top. Then the project moved right, and every improvement moved with it.
In the plants I walk now, what once required replacing the system underneath can increasingly be done on top of it. More commonly, organizational issues, rather than technical ones, are holding manufacturers back.
Test that rather than taking my word for it. Name the workflow costing you the most money this quarter. Then, ask your own team what it would take to improve that one thing on the system you already run. Make them answer before the next roadmap review.
Make one big decision in the next 90 days.
If you do one thing after reading this, make it specific.
Name a single decision made every day in your operation on incomplete information. Give one person ownership of closing that gap within ninety days and one number to move: downtime hours, changeover minutes, scrap rate.
Having the best roadmap won’t allow you to pull ahead if you are still waiting for it to start.
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