Digital Manufacturing 2Day 2026: What Five Speakers Agreed On
Our takeaways from compering Digital Manufacturing 2Day 2026 at the MTC: what five speakers agreed on, the question nobody answered, and what to do with it.
Switching off on holiday: why I packed no business books
We are taking September off. Before we go, a confession that seems to bother people more than it should. I am not taking a single business book with me. Not one. Every August my feed fills with the same photograph. Eight books on a sun lounger, spines out, all of them about strategy, or habits, …
Read more “Switching off on holiday: why I packed no business books”
Smart Manufacturing Trends: Four Years, One Stuck Number
I have read four editions of the Rockwell State of Smart Manufacturing Report back to back, and I keep coming back to the same number. In 2024, manufacturers said only 44% of the data they collected got used well. Two years later, in a report branded the “execution era”, that figure sits at 43%. Almost …
Read more “Smart Manufacturing Trends: Four Years, One Stuck Number”
UK Manufacturing in 2026: What the First Half Actually Told Us
Takeaways H1 2026 didn’t hand manufacturing a new problem. It handed us reports that finally measured an old one and wouldn’t let it stay anecdotal. The real question for H2 isn’t whether the gap exists. It’s what you’ll find once you check your own patch. Six months ago you likely believed your ops team had …
Read more “UK Manufacturing in 2026: What the First Half Actually Told Us”
Cyber resilience in manufacturing is an uptime KPI: how to design a safe restart operators can run
Cyber resilience in manufacturing has become an uptime KPI. When systems fail, the question is not what policy do we have. It is how fast can we recover, and can we restart safely on a live line. Many firms invest heavily in prevention. Yet they still struggle when reality hits. The gap is not technical. …
Condition-based maintenance that works: turning alerts into fewer breakdowns, not more noise
What you will get from this article Condition-based maintenance sounds simple. Monitor asset health. Spot problems early. Fix them before they become breakdowns. In practice, CBM often delivers something less useful. A stream of alerts. Nobody trusts them. Nobody owns them. Nobody acts on them. Operators see noise. Maintenance teams see extra work. Leaders see …
AI in manufacturing without the hype: where it helps, where it harms, and how to stay in control
AI in manufacturing is not a silver bullet. It does not fix messy processes, unclear decisions, or weak standard work. In fact, it tends to make those problems run faster, in the wrong direction, with more confidence. You are already running two jobs at once: keep today’s output stable and change the system producing it. …
Decision latency in manufacturing: the hidden cost of slow decisions in 2026
Decision latency in manufacturing is one of those problems nobody budgets for, yet everyone pays for. You see it when a line keeps running “just in case”, when quality issues drift for hours before containment, or when maintenance triage turns into a debate rather than a decision. The irony is that most operations leaders are …
Read more “Decision latency in manufacturing: the hidden cost of slow decisions in 2026”
Modern MES Systems, Real Impact: Why 2026 Is The Moment To Rethink Your Factory Nerve Centre
The system everyone feels but nobody talks about If you run a factory today, you live with a constant background tension. Demand shifts late. Materials arrive out of sequence. Experienced people are hard to replace. Energy and carbon numbers now appear in every board pack. You spend a lot of time trying to keep the …
A Manufacturing Christmas Carol – Ghosts of Transformation Past, Present and Yet to Come
It was the last night shift before Christmas. The line was still running, the emails were still pinging, and a tired manufacturing leader was walking the factory one more time before heading home. Let’s call them Eben Scroggs (or should that be Ebenezer Scrooge?). Dickensian Christmas or not, Eben’s head was full of the same questions many leaders …
Read more “A Manufacturing Christmas Carol – Ghosts of Transformation Past, Present and Yet to Come”