With economic and operational pressures and extremely rapid advances in areas like automation and AI, this is a pivotal year for manufacturers to transform and “future-proof” their processes.
Based on a survey of more than 330 manufacturing leaders, CADDi’s American Manufacturing Pressure and Productivity Index offers insights into key concerns and trends for manufacturing businesses this year.
The report urges manufacturers to centralize and digitize data, improve cross-functional collaboration, and empower workers with accessible insights – especially as pressures mount in relation to onshoring, competition, and economic uncertainty.
isoTracker’s streamlined QMS software is a strategic solution, especially for small to mid-sized manufacturers. It helps manufacturers mitigate the challenges through better data accessibility, streamlined processes and continuous improvement.
Major quality concerns for manufacturers in 2026
Here, we summarize the key concerns and quality issues for manufacturers highlighted in the CADDi report.
Data access as a barrier to profitability and productivity
Access to data – or the lack of it – is profoundly impacting profitability and productivity.
Manufacturing professionals are spending hours each week tracking down and ensuring the accuracy of data required to do their jobs. This time-inefficiency is estimated to be costing companies 20-30% of their revenue each year.
Some professionals spend as many as 20 hours a week – equivalent to a part-time job – on these data activities before they can get their real work done.
The time adds up fast. Forty-one percent of procurement professionals, 50% of engineering professionals, and 54% of sales professionals say they spend one to two hours each day tracking down critical and/or historical information.
Eighteen percent of procurement, 13% of engineering, and 21% of sales professionals spend more than four hours a day on these tasks. This has a massive impact on productivity.
Traditional manufacturing software systems like ERPs, PLM/PDM tools, CAD programs, or engineering document management products are all designed to serve specific functions within the broader manufacturing team. They fall short in providing the comprehensive and timely information manufacturing teams need to drive their work forward.
The data in each of these systems represents a portion of a manufacturer’s historical record. Unfortunately, being housed across so many silos also leads to critical inconsistencies in categorization, naming conventions, units of measure and more.
Manual data entry across these different systems creates a high risk of errors. Because each tool is designed for a specific user group, these systems don’t service multiple departments well, which limits visibility, collaboration and productivity.
Skilled labor shortages and institutional knowledge loss
Two of the top three pressure points currently facing manufacturers are:
- a lack of access to skilled labor
- equipping current employees to step into strategic roles.
These issues are so serious that senior executives admit to staying awake at night struggling with how to secure skilled labor to advance business priorities, and the ongoing need to ensure employee satisfaction and empowerment.
The skilled labor gap is acute. Experienced workers are retiring and fewer young people entering the field, forcing manufacturers to operate with significantly fewer resources. A lack of skilled workers reduces productivity, delays R&D activities, and slows time to market.
Nearly three-quarters of senior executives at US manufacturers expect to retire within the next decade. Sixty-eight percent believe at least half of their institutional knowledge will be lost forever when they retire. That leaves the rest of the organization without the critical insights it needs to succeed.
Unfortunately, the internal data challenges outlined earlier greatly hamper management’s attempts to leverage technology to offset some of the more acute pain related to the skilled labor crisis.
Speed to market and supply chain efficiency
Manufacturers are desperate to achieve faster speed to market and to drive supply chain efficiencies.
They are constantly in a race against time. The faster manufacturers can create innovative, high-quality and price-competitive parts and products, the sooner they can reap the revenue rewards.
But their procurement and engineering teams aren’t working fast enough because of siloed data and a lack of smooth interdepartmental collaboration.
For example, 77% of procurement professionals say that every few projects they have to find a new part, product, or supplier because the one they found initially didn’t meet engineering’s specifications. This is a major inefficiency that kills speed to market and eats at revenue.
Manufacturers wanting to improve speed to market must solve their internal data issues. Fifty-five percent of procurement professionals say that if they had access to every part in inventory along with all the associated historical data, they could collaborate with engineering easier and earlier to create better products faster, and 59% said they could reduce the risks of defects and faulty parts.
Engineers could design products faster if they had:
- access to performance data
- data to help understand
- access to historical specifications
- digitized and centralized drawings.
Digital transformation and AI adoption
Digital transformation and AI adoption must go hand in hand to improve productivity and increase revenue. The value of AI extends well beyond the immediate need for data centrality and accuracy.
Not empowering the workforce with centralized intelligence leads to slower production cycles and revenue growth, missed innovation opportunities, and delayed response to market changes.
In today’s operating environment, manufacturers can’t afford for their people to waste time and make decisions that affect revenue and profitability based on incomplete information.
Manufacturers that don’t invest now to solve the data challenge will risk undermining the organization’s competitiveness and long-term viability.
From pressure to performance: building resilience through a QMS
Manufacturers are under considerable pressure from all sides. While today’s landscape is challenging, pressures also bring opportunity.
Just as pressure can create diamonds, today’s difficult market circumstances can forge stronger, more resilient manufacturers if the right strategies are implemented.
By proactively getting the organization’s procurement and data under control and boosting productivity, manufacturers can position themselves to navigate today’s pressures successfully and thrive in the future.
One of the smartest way to do this is through quality management software. A QMS transforms a manufacturer’s “firefighting” into proactive resilience. It serves as a central repository for operational data, optimizes processes, accelerates time to market, reduces waste, and minimizes errors and defects.
The CADDi report recommends implementing four things today to empower your team with the time and capacity to focus on what matters most:
- digitize and centralize all your manufacturing drawings and insights into one system
- connect all relevant supply chain, design and quotation data to associated drawings
- enable your team to easily search drawings by shape, text, dimension, part names and more
- equip your team to easily search for and locate similar, previously purchased parts with instant pricing and design details.
How isoTracker can help alleviate manufacturers’ top quality concerns
The CADDi report highlights manufacturers’ top quality concerns and suggests steps to resolve them.
Manufacturers must audit their current quality processes and explore the value of isoTracker’s cost-effective QMS for centralizing quality processes, reducing inefficiencies and overcoming key manufacturing challenges.
Contact us at isoTracker to find out how our cloud-based software can help alleviate manufacturers’ top quality concerns or sign up for a free 60-day trial.
