If you run a machinery or components business right now, you already know the pressure is real. Costs are up across the board: materials, energy, labor. Tariffs are reshaping supply chains that took years to build, with 86 percent of supply chain leaders reporting direct impact in 2026.
And the workforce you need to keep up? Up to 1.9 million manufacturing roles are expected to go unfilled by the early 2030s.
You are being asked to deliver more complexity, more custom configurations, faster, with less margin for error and fewer people to do it with. The harder problem is that modernizing your way out of this is not as straightforward as it sounds.
McKinsey’s research shows that 70 percent of the software still running Fortune 500 companies was built over two decades ago. These systems were designed to record what happened, not help you act on what is happening right now. They can’t flag a supplier risk before it hits your build schedule, and they can’t close the loop between insight and action. Yet swapping them out is no easy fix either.
Gartner finds that between 55 percent and 75 percent of ERP projects fail to meet their goals, with discrete manufacturing seeing the worst outcomes of any sector.
That is the legacy straitjacket. You know you need to change. You have probably been burned before. And the clock is not slowing down.
However, the solution to all those aforementioned challenges is not living in the frustrations of the past. Success in manufacturing requires a dedication and desire to solve problems and move forward. While the successful integration of ERP platforms, or any software or technology for that matter, will spawn downtime and foster other internal struggles, the long-term benefits will justify the short-term pains.
These dynamics can be found throughout the industrial sector, but are spelled out in tremendous detail via a recent white paper entitled Stuck in the Past, Competing in the Present from QAD Redzone. You can download a copy at no charge by clicking here.
