Manufacturing Agility Starts with Connected Data and MES

June 19, 2025

The Factory Floor Can’t Adapt Without This | SPONSORED

Manufacturers are under relentless pressure to adapt—fast. But while the demand for agility is everywhere, the reality on the ground tells a different story. Most factory floors still rely on outdated systems, fragmented data, and manual workarounds that leave them exposed to disruptions.

The problem isn’t the lack of ambition. It’s the absence of a reliable foundation.

The Real Meaning of Agility

Adaptability in manufacturing isn’t about moving faster. It’s about knowing exactly when, where, and how to shift without compromising quality, safety, or delivery. That level of precision requires something most operations don’t yet have: real-time, contextualized, and connected data.

You can’t reconfigure a production line in 24 hours—or switch suppliers overnight—if your systems don’t talk to each other.

What’s Missing: A Functional Core

The modern factory still struggles with three persistent gaps:

Disconnected Machines
Most production lines are a patchwork of old and new equipment with no shared language. Data lives in silos, if it exists at all.
Inconsistent Execution
Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) are either missing, misused, or fragmented. Without structured execution, there’s no consistent view of what’s happening—or why.
Data Without Context
Even when data is captured, it often lacks context: Which operator? What shift? Which customer order? This renders it useless for real-time decision-making or AI applications.

Without these layers working together, agility is just a buzzword.

A Simple, Non-Negotiable Model: Connect, Execute, Analyze

Forget big digital transformation programs. Here’s what factories actually need:

Connect:
Normalize data across machines with gateways, converters, and lightweight edge computing. This step is foundational.
Execute:
Use MES not as a passive tracker, but as an active coordinator—assigning context to every process, material, and human input.
Analyze:
Once data is structured and contextualized, platforms can drive predictive quality, exception handling, and performance optimization.

Each layer feeds the next. Skip one, and the system breaks.

Why Context Is Everything

Collecting machine data is easy. Making it meaningful is hard.

Sensors alone can tell you that a temperature spike occurred. But without context—what batch was running, which component was affected, who operated the line—it’s just noise.

A structured MES adds that layer of intelligence, making machine data usable for analytics, root-cause detection, and even AI models. And it does it in real-time.

You Can’t Retrofit Agility

Many manufacturers ask: What’s the ROI of investing in MES or industrial data platforms?

But that’s the wrong question. Foundational infrastructure doesn’t need a single-use business case. It enables everything else—from traceability to flexibility to faster changeovers.

Ask instead: Can we afford not to be adaptable?

The factory floor doesn’t need more dashboards or buzzwords. It needs structure. Agility only happens when machine connectivity, process execution, and analytics operate as one system—not three projects.

Until that happens, manufacturers will continue to chase agility from behind.

This article is based on the session “Thriving Amid Uncertainty: Building Agility in the Manufacturing Industry” at IIoT World Manufacturing Day 2025.