What 20 years in UK manufacturing taught me about digitisation
Start where the pain is. Build small. Pick a platform that grows with you. The unglamorous methodology that actually works.
We are surrounded by data. Almost none of it is where you need it, when you need it.
Walk into any UK manufacturing business and you will find more data than the team can process. PLM, MES, ERP, IoT, scheduling, quality, finance. Every system holds part of the truth. None of them holds the whole truth. And the gaps between them get filled by spreadsheets, emails, and the experienced operators who happen to remember.
That is not a technology problem. That is an integration problem, a process problem, and a people problem all at the same time. And solving it badly is more expensive than not solving it at all.
"In manufacturing we are not short of data. We are short of decisions that data could be making for us, if it was joined up."
Why UK manufacturers cannot afford to keep digitising in fits and starts
The UK economy grew 0.1 percent in the last three months of 2025. Margins for British manufacturers are tighter than they have been in a decade. Energy costs are still elevated. Reshoring opportunities exist, but only for businesses that can react quickly. AI is being sold as a shortcut by people who do not understand your data.
This is not the moment for another "we'll fix it in 18 months" enterprise project. This is the moment for small, well-aimed changes that pay back inside a quarter and build the foundation for the next one.
Three questions that should come before any software decision
1. Where do you actually want to go? Not "we need better visibility." That is too vague to plan around. Specifically: which decision are you trying to make faster, which margin are you trying to defend, which customer commitment are you trying to keep?
2. How fast, and what is the route? Do you have the cash, the leadership focus and the operator goodwill for one big bet, or do you need to land a win in 90 days to keep momentum? There is a right answer for each business. It is rarely the same one.
3. What does success look like when you arrive? If you cannot draw the end state on a single side of A4, you do not understand it well enough to spend money on it yet. This is the question most projects skip, and most projects regret skipping.
Answer those three honestly and you have a brief that any decent partner can quote against. Skip them and you have a wish list that any vendor can sell you something against.
Start where the pain is, not where the vendor wants you to start.
The best transformation projects I have been part of in 20 years all start with the same move: pick the most painful workflow in the business and fix it. Not the most strategic. Not the most fashionable. The most painful. Because the people doing the painful work will champion the change instead of resisting it, and because the win is visible enough to fund the next move.
From there, the principle is platform, not application. A platform approach is modular, scalable, and built around how manufacturing actually works. You add the next capability when the business is ready for it, not when the vendor needs another invoice. Failing fast on small experiments beats failing slow on a five-year enterprise programme, every time.
One client wanted "Industry 4.0." We translated that into "let's reduce the time it takes your scheduler to publish the daily plan from 90 minutes to 10." We integrated two existing systems and added one screen. Six weeks of work. The scheduler now has 80 extra minutes a day to spot problems before they become missed deliveries. The same platform now runs three more capabilities the business added once they trusted it.
What we would tell you if we were sat across the table
20 years of UK manufacturing transformations, distilled into four directives.
Pick the most painful workflow first. Pain creates urgency. Urgency creates champions. Champions get projects across the line.Buy a platform, not an application. Applications solve today's problem and lock you in. Platforms let you add the next capability when you are ready, without buying everything again.Ship every 90 days, minimum. A 90-day delivery cadence forces honest scoping. Anything bigger than that loses sponsor attention and operator trust.Connect the top floor to the shop floor before you connect anything else. If the boardroom and the production line are working from different numbers, no amount of system integration will fix it.Wondering which workflow to tackle first?
We run discovery sessions with UK manufacturing teams to pick the smallest valuable change you can ship in 90 days. Half a day, your team, a whiteboard.