Hexagon's Manufacturing Intelligence Business Area published research this week showing a gap between how manufacturers describe their operations and what is happening on the shop floor. The study, commissioned by Hexagon and conducted by Dynata, surveyed 511 professionals in U.S. manufacturing, from entry-level workers to the C-suite. 77 percent describe their operations as fully or mostly connected, but 39 percent report limited feedback between design, manufacturing and quality teams, and 67 percent say data from most of their systems never reaches a single integrated view.
The confidence gap runs down the org chart. 80 percent of executives say their data is integrated, compared with 33 percent of workers on the shop floor, the widest single divide in the research. Nearly a third of executives, 31 percent, say their plant already runs "lights-out" somewhere in the operation, but only 10 percent of their own senior managers agree. For a QA manager, that gap is the real story: leadership can approve automation investments believing the floor already runs the way the dashboards suggest, while the people doing inspection know the feedback loop is still broken.
"Manufacturers aren't wrong when they say they're connected," said Steve Ilmrud, vice president of operations, North America, Stationary Metrology Division at Hexagon. "Connected and integrated are two different things, and companies confident in their connectivity are still finding quality problems late and losing expertise between teams, and both of those get more expensive as production scales. What separates the manufacturers pulling ahead is that they went looking for the handoff where information stops moving, and they fixed that one first."
The cost concentrates in quality. 43 percent of respondents say rework disrupts production schedules, and 42 percent catch quality problems too late to act on efficiently. Two-thirds, 67 percent, lose six or more hours a week to measurement and inspection bottlenecks, and 35 percent lose 11 hours or more. Inspection has already moved close to production: 59 percent now inspect on or near the shop floor, and only 15 percent remain mostly or entirely lab-based. That data often stays inside quality reports instead of reaching the production teams and design engineers who could act on it.
Hexagon frames its answer as connecting design, production, quality, automation and operational data so information moves between teams instead of staying with whoever generated it, a pitch aimed at manufacturers being pushed to grow output without adding headcount or floor space.
