Built to Last: How Manufacturers Can Create a Data Infrastructure for Resilient Operations

Manufacturers are under constant pressure to do more with less—facing economic volatility, workforce shortages, and fragile supply chains. Smart factory tech promises solutions, but without a strong data foundation, most initiatives stall in pilot mode. This white paper offers a practical roadmap to building that foundation so your transformation efforts actually deliver results.

Whether you want to speed up invoice processing, improve forecasting, streamline recruiting, or enhance customer engagement—this guide is your blueprint for turning Oracle AI into a competitive advantage.

Key Takeaways:

• A realistic look at why smart factory initiatives often stall—and how to fix it.
• The six most common data obstacles holding manufacturers back.
• What a high-performing data infrastructure looks like in action.
• Specific ways to support predictive maintenance, demand forecasting, digital twins, and more.
• Real examples of manufacturers who scaled their operations with better data.

Sneak Peek

The Manufacturing Leadership Council recently discovered that 70 % of manufacturers still enter data manually. What’s meant to enable speed and clarity too often becomes another source of complexity and slowdown. Here’s where transformation efforts break down:

• Disparate Systems: ERP, MES, SCADA, WMS, CRM, and spreadsheets have overlapping but inconsistent data.
• Dirty or Incomplete Data: Metrics don’t match between departments. Key fields are missing. Units aren’t standardized. Models can’t be trained when the inputs aren’t reliable.
• Lagging Reports: By the time reports are consolidated and reviewed, conditions have changed. Teams act on stale or incomplete insight.
• Pilot Purgatory: One plant tests a dashboard. Another experiments with AI. But scaling fails because there’s no centralized architecture or governance.
• No Shared View: Each function runs its own numbers. Forecasting, capacity planning, and quality decisions are made in silos. Cross-functional misalignment drains resources and trust.

The Manufacturing Leadership Council’s data survey found that less than half of manufacturers have 51% or more of their data available in real-time.

Download the full white paper to see how a modern data foundation can turn complexity into competitive advantage.