LNS Research

08/20/2026

Most manufacturers don't struggle with the technology behind autonomous operations. Where the real struggle often lies is in knowing when to let the system do its thing without a human checking its work first.

This is the stuff that makes most Type A leaders' foreheads start to sweat.

That line separating "AI can do this on its own" from "someone needs eyes on this" is what LNS Research calls a safe operating envelope, and it's turning out to be one of the clearest dividers between industrial Leaders and Followers.

Our recent research shows that 44% of Leaders trust autonomous inspection technology to make accurate decisions without manual oversight. Among Followers, that number was only 16%. This pretty big gap isn't about who bought better sensors, but who actually did the work of defining where the envelope is before turning the system loose.

It's easier to trust the system once you've drawn the lines yourself. Less brow sweat required.

We're excited to welcome Anne Vermillion Emberson, Vice President of Digital at Ecolab, as a speaker at The Transformation Event this October in Boston.

As one of our featured presenters at our AI Insights session, "Autonomous Ops & AI Guardrails for Safe Operating Envelopes," Anne will share her insights with fellow manufacturing executives on how organizations design guardrails that balance autonomy and oversight.

In addition, our presenters will explore in this session how to scale autonomy responsibly without losing sight of governance and control.

LNS Research's The Transformation Event runs October 21-23 in Boston. Sessions are filling up fast. Learn more in the comments below.

08/12/2026

See Spot Run. See Atlas Lift.

See all that and more at Boston Dynamics' Waltham, MA, facility, where manufacturing attendees of LNS Research's The Transformation Event get a firsthand look at the latest in industrial robotics.

The tasks robots like Atlas and Spot are designed to take on tend to be the ones that wear a workforce down the fastest: repetitive motions that cause injury over time, environments too hazardous to keep sending someone into, and roles that go unfilled shift after shift because nobody wants them.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, industrial robot installations in the U.S. climbed 11 percent year over year in 2025.

The Boston Dynamics facility tour isn't just a chance to see the robots move. Attendees will get an up-close look at Atlas in the lab, watch a live demo with Spot, and some lucky attendees may even get to drive Spot themselves.
We'll also get a look at the evolution of robotics and a better understanding of where it's headed next.

Chad Wright, CIO of Boston Dynamics and a keynote speaker at this year's The Transformation Event, says scaling physical AI comes down to redesigning how people and machines divide labor across a plant, not just adding more machines.

Our research on Embedded EHS supports this strategy. We found that 44 percent of Leaders trust autonomous inspection technology to make decisions without manual oversight, compared with just 16 percent of Followers. That divide has less to do with the machines and more to do with whether the organization built the trust and the process to hand the work off in the first place.

Spots (no pun intended) on the tour are first-come, first-served for manufacturing attendees of The Transformation Event, being held October 21-23 in Boston. The tour of Boston Dynamics' impressive facility takes place on Day 1 of the event. Registration is required to attend.

And don't forget to watch the mainstage at the event for a special appearance by Spot.

See Spot take the Spotlight.

This short video introduces some of the high level futures of the p...

08/11/2026

A manufacturing engineer spent over a year waiting on a next-generation MES rollout. Then one person, working alone with AI coding tools, rebuilt the specific functionality their plant needed in under a month.

The MES vendor wasn't wrong to take a year; enterprise rollouts are complicated, and testing across a plant floor takes real time. What has changed is what one engineer can now build alone, on the side, without a procurement cycle.

LNS's research on Intelligent Supply Networks (ISN) keeps turning up something similar. Leaders, the top-performing manufacturers in our data, run unique systems at each plant far more often than Followers do.

And among Leaders who choose unique systems, our research shows that 81% say it's for faster innovation, as long as they can still integrate across plants; Followers rarely make that trade.

Keeping systems different while keeping them connected is the harder problem, and it's the one most conversations about AI-built tools leave out. Fast, purpose-built applications are becoming easy to create. Connecting them to the rest of the plant, and to every other plant, is still expensive, manual work.

A new open specification called i3X is aimed at exactly that gap: not the devices, not the controllers, just the layer between information platforms and the applications that need to pull from them.

i3X is narrow on purpose. It doesn't try to replace OPC UA or MQTT at the device layer; it sits above them, connecting information platforms to the applications that need to pull from them.

Rockwell Automation, AVEVA, ThinkIQ, ThingWorx® from Velotic™, Inductive Automation, and HighByte are among the companies that helped write the i3X specification. Siemens, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ignition, Flow Software Inc., and ACE Technologies Group have already demonstrated interoperability among their platforms via i3X in a live demonstration.

GE Appliances, a Haier company, Georgia-Pacific LLC, and Toyota Motor Corporation North America are among the manufacturers lining up behind this new approach.

Whether i3X becomes the standard that finally sticks is an open question. In all honesty, most new standards don't. Time will have to tell on this one.

In his latest blog, LNS Research Principal Analyst Niels Andersen takes a closer look at i3X and its implications for manufacturers evaluating their operational architecture. See link in comments.

08/07/2026

The COO Council's Board asked LNS Research to test a handful of long-held assumptions about how culture actually behaves inside an operation, the kind of thing many manufacturers take for granted.

One thing came up early and often in the work: culture rarely breaks all at once. It erodes in the handoff, when a leader changes, and nobody planned for what would carry over.

James Wells, LNS Research's Senior Analyst and Research Director, has been leading our culture study, and he'll share it for the first time on August 11th at The COO Council's virtual meeting on Culture & AI.

James is joined by Michael Carroll, LNS Research's Research Fellow and The COO Council Advisor, and Mehul Shah, LNS Research's Co-Founder and Commercial Lead, who will add additional insights on this critical leadership topic.

Additional industrial executive guest presenters sharing their personal experiences and lessons learned include:

• Thomas Potgieter, PhD, SVP of Cell Therapy Development & Operations at Bristol Myers Squibb
• Dirk Holbach, PhD, Chief Supply Chain Officer & COO (former) at Henkel
• Carles Belmonte, Head of Supply Chain Strategy and Development (M&A) at Henkel

Both Bristol Myers Squibb and Henkel are recognized on LNS Research's World's Most Productive Companies list. Thomas Potgieter will speak to how his team kept people at the center of automation work, and Dirk Holbach and Carles Belmonte will share how Henkel activated 150+ supply chain leaders and delivered a 5-year value plan in half the expected time.

If you're a COO interested in joining the meeting, there's still time to request an invite. Details in the first comment.

08/05/2026

MES has been called a dying category for years. Not so fast. Don't plan the wake just yet.

LNS Research's ongoing Solution Selection Matrix work on large discrete MES found EVERY vendor in the group reporting growing revenue and ARR, with 30%+ CAGR over the last three years as the norm. And ALL had aggressive plans for continued growth.

That's not even a coma, folks.

To be clear, this isn't a handful of legacy vendors coasting on old contracts, either. Every vendor in the peer group we've studied, most of them 15-plus years in the business, is investing heavily in new product development right now.

Cloud offerings have arrived across the board, yet the growth is happening alongside, not instead of, the core on-prem MES business.

On-premise deployment hasn't gone away either. Safety requirements, equipment automation, response times, and round-the-clock reliability requirements still push most manufacturers toward on-prem. Air-gapped deployments remain common in aerospace, defense, and nuclear.

Interestingly enough, some vendors that started out cloud-only are now building on-prem versions of their own.

Our research also shows vendors are rolling out AI in two distinct ways: building it directly into the MES to automate tasks and answer questions, and enabling the MES to plug into broader enterprise AI workflows so it can coordinate with other systems.

None of this is a surprise to Research Fellow Tom Comstock, who has spent 40-plus years studying this market. His take, after four decades of witnessing the Twain-esque exaggerations of MES's death, is this: the category keeps changing shape, but it never actually goes away.

To learn more about Tom's MES observations, read his latest blog, "The King is Dead, Long Live the King." See comments for link.

And watch for LNS Research's complete Solution Selection Matrix on large discrete MES, out later this year.

08/04/2026

Cummins Inc. is rebuilding how the company makes decisions at scale. Boston Dynamics is helping manufacturers actually get robots running on their shop floors, not just piloted in a lab.

These are very different transformation stories, but they're both defining what industrial work looks like next.

Bonnie Fetch has spent nearly four decades in industrial operations. As EVP and President of Global Operations at Cummins, a World's Most Productive Companies winner, she's flattening decision-making and scaling AI beyond pilot programs, neither of which is a small undertaking. She's also rebuilding culture, not as a values poster on the wall, but as something built into the actual rhythm of daily work.

Chad Wright has spent nearly three decades in enterprise IT, the last seven as CIO of Boston Dynamics. He's learned what actually separates a successful robotics rollout from a stalled one, and it usually comes down to whether the process, infrastructure, and plan for the workforce were ready before the robot ever showed up.

Though these two transformation stories are quite different, Bonnie and Chad share this in common: in both cases, the technology has never been the hardest part; the operating model underneath it is.

This October 21-23 in Boston, Bonnie and Chad will bring their thought leadership and operational lessons learned to the main stage as keynote speakers at LNS Research's The Transformation Event.

Bonnie will dig into the harder question underneath her own work: what has to be true in how decisions get made, who decides what, how fast, and with what data, before AI runs at enterprise scale instead of one pilot at a time.

Chad will talk about trust as the real variable in scaling robotics: trust in the technology, in the data behind it, and in the leadership that's asking people to work alongside it.

Don't miss these impactful executive speakers and more at this year's annual conference for industrial leaders. This year's theme focuses on the transformation topic on every manufacturing exec's mind these days: AI & Building the Future of Industrial Work.

We anticipate another sold-out event, and sessions are filling up fast. See comments below to learn more and register today.

Event Sponsored by: Redzone from QAD, Seeq Corporation, Braincube, DeepHow, Dozuki, Haber, Hitachi, Infinite Uptime, Octave, Oden Technologies, Poka Inc., and https://hubs.ly/Q04rQq430.

07/30/2026

Please join us in welcoming Nicole Hayes to LNS Research as our Community & Events Engagement Director.

Nicole has spent 15+ years building executive communities and running major industry conferences, everything from intimate CEO forums to gatherings for several thousand.

LNS Research Events are one of the important ways our relationships with industrial operations leaders continue to take shape in person, and where these executives build relationships with one another. Nicole will be helping drive that engagement across our executive programs and The COO Council.

Nicole has already hit the ground running, with The Transformation Event this October 21-23 in Boston as one of her first main focuses.

If you're part of the LNS Research community or are thinking about joining it, feel free to reach out to Nicole directly, and be sure to follow her on LinkedIn.

Welcome, Nicole.

07/29/2026

A worker who's been on the line for three years doesn't carry the same hazard memory as one who's been there for 30.

That gap is really showing up in the numbers. Fatalities in manufacturing have been climbing since 2018, not declining despite advances in manufacturing. And it's happening at the same time that average tenure on the floor has compressed from a 30-year career to something closer to a three-year job.

Whatever knowledge used to walk around a plant in someone's head is leaving faster than most safety programs can write it down.

So, the instinct is to answer this problem with more: more compliance... more audits... more record-keeping... and more policies that almost no one reads until something goes wrong.

Stop, no MORE!

LNS Research's work on Embedded EHS suggests that this instinct needs to be retired once and for all. In fact, our data shows that only one in five manufacturers has actually crossed the line from EHS as recordkeeping to EHS as something that changes outcomes. Half are still stuck at the earliest stage: reactive, siloed, treating the safety system as separate from the production system it's meant to protect.

Owens Corning and Indorama Ventures are investing in Virtual Operations Centers that put proven practices and real-time hazard data in front of the people on the floor, not just in a report an auditor reads later.

Not surprisingly, both these leading organizations are on LNS Research's World's Most Productive Companies list and are represented on The COO Council by board members Chad Anderson and Kevin Smith.

Leaders overall are 2.4 times more likely to integrate safety data across plant assets, maintenance records, and HR systems. After all, a permit-to-work process that lives in a binder can't really warn anyone about anything.

To learn more, read LNS Research Analyst Allison Kuhn's latest work on Embedded EHS; link in comments.

07/27/2026

Henkel and Bristol Myers Squibb operate in very different industries. One makes consumer and industrial goods. The other develops life-saving therapies. Beyond both being recognized among LNS Research's World's Most Productive Companies™, they share another commonality.

Both learned the same lesson about organizational culture: you can't buy it, install it, or mandate it. Successful transformation requires building culture deliberately, layer by layer, over time.

Henkel's supply chain transformation is a great example. When the company merged two underperforming consumer business units, supply chain became one of three core value drivers. Rather than aiming for the "best of both," leadership set top-quartile targets and aligned more than 150 supply chain leaders around a shared agenda, working through one leadership layer each quarter until it reached the shop floor.

It took nearly three years. Dirk Holbach, PhD, then Chief Supply Chain Officer & COO, has been clear about what made the transformation successful: culture and change management fueled everything else.

Bristol Myers Squibb experienced something similar. Thomas Potgieter, PhD, SVP of Cell Therapy Development & Operations, shares what happened when his team introduced automation into a highly manual production process.

The initiative was well planned and consistently communicated. Yet psychological safety still declined. While people understood the vision, many struggled to see where they fit in the future being described.

Once the conversation shifted to what their roles would become and how they would be supported, people got on board, and the initiative gained real momentum.

Culture is one of the COO Council's top priorities this year. On August 11, leaders from Henkel and Bristol Myers Squibb will join the LNS Research team and Council to discuss one of manufacturing's biggest transformation challenges: scaling AI through culture and operating model alignment.

🔗 https://hubs.ly/Q04qVSl90

07/22/2026

The good news is that after 13 straight years of decline and a volatile pandemic-era round trip, industrial productivity turned upward again in 2025. The bad news is that the gain is modest, to say the least, and the performance gap between Leaders and Followers just keeps widening.

Keep your hands inside the ride...this is a bit of a rollercoaster story.

According to LNS Research's Industrial Productivity Index™, which tracks total factor productivity across more than 600 publicly traded manufacturers, the index lost more than 15% of its value between a 2007 peak and a 2020 low.

What followed next was a sharp rebound to a new all-time high by 2022.

But then, manufacturers surrendered nearly HALF of that gain over the next two years.

Now for the smaller hill...in 2025, aggregate industrial productivity improved modestly. But the much bigger movement is in the split between Leaders and Followers. The Top 100 World's Most Productive Companies™ are up about 25% in productivity since 2019, and the Top 30 Productivity Pathfinders™ are up more than 28%.

Yet the other 512 Followers in the index are up only about 3%.

It gets even more interesting as we examine the specific industries and peer groups. Our productivity study spans 10 major industries, and within each one, it further breaks down results by peer group for a much more granular view.

High-Tech is up close to 39% since 2019, driven by the capital cycle in semiconductors and AI infrastructure. Automotive and Energy also sit above their 2019 baseline. Consumer Products is roughly flat. Industrial Equipment, Food and Beverage, Chemicals, and Materials all remain below where they started, still weighed down by the input costs that hit materials- and energy-intensive operations hardest.

Inside each of those groups, including those still below baseline, some companies kept gaining ground the whole time, regardless of what their industry did.

The Industrial Productivity Index moved in the right direction this year. Whether that's a real recovery or a pause before the next round trip is still an open question. Not every seat on this ride ends up in the same place.

Full industry-by-industry breakdown in the comments.