Why Manufacturers Struggle With Digital Transformation

Claudia Soto-Saavedra

May 20, 2026

4 mins

If you're leading IT or operations at a manufacturing company, you already know the pressure to modernize. Rising costs, labor shortages, supply chain complexity, and AI expectations are all hitting at once.

What makes manufacturing uniquely hard is that your operations are physical, time-sensitive, and compliance-heavy. A delay on the shop floor is not an inconvenience. It is a shipment that does not go out, a work order that stalls, a compliance record that is incomplete. There is very little margin for error, and legacy infrastructure compounds every one of those risks.

The challenge is not motivation or budget. It is execution. This post breaks down where transformation stalls and what manufacturers who are making progress are doing differently.

The Ambition Is Real

Manufacturers are not sitting still. According to a 2024 Deloitte report, 98% have already started their digital transformation journey , and investment continues to flow:

80% are putting serious resources into smart manufacturing (according to their 2026 report) and
40% are going all-in on AI and machine learning (according to their 2025 report).

Leadership is bought in and the intent is there. But starting a transformation journey is not the same as completing one. According to the same Deloitte report, only 11% of manufacturers have fully aligned digital strategy with operational execution. The majority are somewhere in the middle: making real progress, but consistently running into the same friction that keeps the finish line out of reach.

So Why Is Digital Transformation So Hard?

The barriers are consistent across the industry. According to Cognizant, 85% of senior executives worry their current tech cannot support transformation, and 79% will not clear their tech debt in time. Deloitte found that 70% are blocked by data quality problems , and a separate survey of 500 IT professionals across industries by Saritasa found that 62% are still running on legacy systems.

These numbers point to the same root cause. Legacy systems look like a contained problem until they are not. When systems cannot communicate, data stops moving. When data stops moving, decisions get made on incomplete information, quality issues surface downstream instead of at the source, and compliance documentation gets pieced together manually.

Fragmented workflows compound this further. When information lives on paper, in siloed applications, or in someone's inbox, you lose operational visibility across the floor. You cannot optimize what you cannot see, and you cannot scale a process that depends on manual intervention to hold it together.

The data problem is not about volume. Manufacturers have plenty of data. The problem is that the data is not connected, not clean, and not reaching the right people at the right time.

Consider what this looks like in practice. Blackwoods, one of Australia's largest suppliers of industrial and safety products, was managing 800 to 900 printers across 70 sites before modernizing its print infrastructure. Freight management print jobs were taking over two minutes each. Login times stretched to 45 minutes in some cases. Employees were abandoning print jobs entirely. Every one of those delays rippled into dispatch, distribution, and the ability to get goods out the door.

The Fix Is Not One Big Bang

The manufacturers gaining the most ground are not trying to transform everything at once. They are identifying the foundational layers that, when modernized, unlock progress everywhere else. The manufacturers who pull ahead are better at strategy and build the operational foundation to match it. Deloitte found only 11% have managed to do both.

The highest-leverage starting point is digitizing how information flows across the operation. Connecting shop floor data to back-office systems directly addresses the fragmentation and data quality problems that stall everything else.

Print is one of the most underestimated foundational layers in manufacturing. It touches labels, work orders, shipping documents, and compliance records, which means it is embedded in nearly every critical workflow. Most IT teams treat it as background noise until it breaks, and by then the damage is already done.

Intelligent Print Automation (IPA) addresses both legacy infrastructure and fragmented workflows. It moves manufacturers from on-prem print servers to serverless cloud-native print and bridges front-end systems like ERP and WMS to back-end output devices, so data flows automatically without manual intervention in between. When the front end generates a print request and the back end executes it reliably—with full visibility and the ability to troubleshoot when something goes wrong—you have closed one of the most common gaps in manufacturing operations.

Visibility closes the loop. An Admin Console that surfaces print activity across facilities lets IT catch failures before they become production delays, without anyone having to chase down a confirmation.

Blackwoods is the proof point. After partnering with Vasion, print times dropped by 95%. Jobs that previously took two minutes now take two seconds. Login times improved by over 80%. And a single administrator now manages over a thousand printers across the country, all rolled out within a month with no project manager required.

"I still didn't believe it until I did it," said Matthew Horvat, IT Operations Manager at Blackwoods.

The Payoff Is Worth It

Manufacturers who solve the foundational pieces unlock compounding operational gains across the entire business.

For manufacturers, data quality and infrastructure problems remain the most significant obstacles to AI implementation, according to a 2025 Deloitte report , and nearly 70% of manufacturers report facing them. Solving that foundation is what unlocks the operational gains that compound across the business.

Ready to Modernize Your Manufacturing Operations?

Digital transformation in manufacturing does not stall because of a lack of ambition or investment. It stalls because the foundational infrastructure holding everything together has not been modernized.

Vasion helps manufacturing IT teams tackle those foundational layers and move faster with less disruption. See how we support manufacturing operations and schedule a demo to get started.