Insights & Articles

US manufacturing could need 3.8 million new workers by 2033, and 1.9 million of those roles may go unfilled. Meanwhile 42% of maintenance technicians are over 55, and the knowledge they never wrote down leaves with them. What changed is that capturing it no longer requires your experts to become technical writers.

SAP ends mainstream maintenance for ECC on December 31, 2027, and a majority of customers still have not started. A vendor deadline is a real constraint — but it is not a recommendation, and the party that set it is not neutral. Here are the three options nobody lays out side by side.

For most manufacturers, tariffs are not destroying demand — they are quietly compressing margin, one purchase order at a time. With 78% citing trade uncertainty as their top concern and 64% saying they will not reshore to avoid it, the answer is not a plant relocation.

98% of manufacturers are exploring AI, but only 20% say they are ready to deploy it at scale. That gap — backed by 2026 survey data and sobering failure rates — is where the industry's winners and losers will be decided. Here is what separates the 20% that scale from the 80% stuck running pilots that never reach the floor.

Every vendor wants to sell you a new AI-native ERP. For most small and mid-market manufacturers, that is the wrong move. The faster, cheaper, lower-risk path is building intelligent applications and AI agents around the ERP database you already own — and automating the workflows that actually cost you money.

Every ERP vendor and analyst firm is talking about autonomous ERP in 2026. But is it actually the defining trend — or just well-marketed hype? We break down the Gartner and Forrester data, the real vendor capabilities from SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle, the 86% pilot failure rate, and what small and mid-market manufacturers should actually do about it right now.