Speed Over Spectacle: Why Manufacturing Innovation Must Deliver Now, Not in 5 Years
5 minutes read · 23rd Mai 2025
Article by Max Winchester
Innovation for the sake of results
Attend any manufacturing conference or trade show today and you will be faced with an overwhelming number of new and revolutionary digital manufacturing solutions: software, hardware, augmented gadgets, and autonomous gizmos. You will witness slick presentations, smooth promises, and even get to pet a robot dog if you are lucky.
The pitch is compelling: sign here and your organization will be completely overhauled. You will get data lakes and digital twins and the IIoT and augmented glasses and LLMs and autonomous control rooms and your global network of 50 sites will suddenly be operated by a single click of a button.
It all sounds wonderful, until you hear how long it will take before actual improvement results are seen on the shopfloor: just a cool 3, 4, 5 years or so.
I am being dramatic for effect, of course. There is value to be found in these innovations, and I admire organizations that are truly at the cutting edge, shaping the future that we will all benefit from. But the reality is that the manufacturing industry is plagued by organizations where the digital ambition, budget, leadership, and momentum is wildly detached from the reality of the situation on the production floor.
To illustrate an example, I was recently speaking with the regional manufacturing head of a global organization who had just installed ChartEx, Chartwell’s SaaS Improvement Platform, at one of their priority sites – a site that was partway through an accelerated, Chartwell-supported improvement journey.
The previous week he had met with a senior manager in their global digitization/IT/OT function to discuss the pilot installation of ChartEx and assess where else in the network it could add rapid value.
The response was unexpected (and I paraphrase): “I don’t get involved in Operational Improvement topics. I am focused on data collection and connectivity.”
This highlights a crucial disconnect I am seeing within many manufacturing organizations, and it got me thinking: what indeed is the purpose of data collection and connectivity if not to drive actions that improve the operational performance of the sites?
For many, it seems as though innovation for the sake of innovation is the driving force behind digital manufacturing decisions. In an academic environment this would be completely reasonable – innovation for the sake of innovation helps discover new frontiers of science and engineering. But in the world of fierce competition, trade wars, and quarterly EBITDA targets, organizations need to be aligned and move with focus towards a more valuable and immediate purpose behind manufacturing digitization decision making.
Speed to insights
One of the most common themes I observed across many digital transformations in the manufacturing industry is speed, or more accurately, lack of speed to insights.
Months—even years—into a digital change program, end-users can be left wondering when the transformation will improve their ways of working and the productivity of the process they manage.
The issue is so pervasive and accepted that it now affects decision making; when it is pre-assumed that digital projects will be over time, over budget, and over resourced it stifles action, and projects don’t even get off the ground.
Our guiding principle at Chartwell is—and always will be—to have the greatest positive impact in the shortest possible time.
When leading hands-on improvement projects, this takes the form of Rapid Results Teams (RRTs) that meet every day to uncover potential, identify top losses, and problem solve constraints at speed to make tangible progress at an unprecedented pace.
In the digital space, our complementary approach is to identify the fastest path to generating clear, actionable, and above all, valuable insights. Once this is established, we aim to have a functional version of the system in place within days or weeks, not months or years.
The digital migration
The reasoning is simple: when the primary mission is to make good decisions every shift and every day to set the plant and our colleagues up for success, we can get 80% of the way there with a whiteboard, some clearly defined metrics, and a regular review cadence.
In the ‘90s and beyond, many sites migrated from whiteboards and into Excel, or some combination of the two. Still, the goal remained to bring clarity to decision making by presenting data in a way that is insightful and informative.
Now, as we migrate again from the spreadsheets and dispersed data systems of the early 2000s, focus should remain on that one mission: to make decision making clear and easy for the entire team. We need to be taking action based on a solid understanding of the underlying facts in order to keep improving.
Clarity on the goal
When we lose sight of the core purpose of what we are doing with digitization, it can lead us down some very long and winding roads. Digital twins, the IIoT, augmented reality, even the now ubiquitous Large Language Models and AI can add a lot of value in certain situations but can equally play their part in distracting from and diminishing the attention that is put towards more immediate gains.
Taking a moment to step back from the buzzwords and reassess what is truly important to the performance of the site is a valuable exercise, and can often help teams simplify, streamline, and supercharge their digitization efforts.
Whether your focus is to improve capacity via bottleneck productivity improvements, or reduce delays via scheduling optimization, or control working capital via inventory management, the best digital solution to bring you results needs to be clearly focused, well designed, and intelligently executed—it does not need to cost you years’ worth of time and budget.