Agility has become a defining advantage for manufacturers navigating global volatility. But as new data reveals, real-time responsiveness depends on the complex, unglamorous work of digitising the value chain from design to supply chain and beyond.
The word most often used to describe manufacturing today is resilience, but the one that truly defines its future is agility. Resilience is about recovery, about bouncing back from shocks. Agility is about dodging the blow altogether. In an era of erratic tariffs, climate shocks, and geopolitical instability, agility is now a board-level concern, not just an operational aspiration.
This year’s Advanced Manufacturing Report from Hexagon, based on a global survey of over 1,000 senior manufacturing leaders, makes that reality stark. From the C-suite down to the shop floor, executives are wrestling with the cost of inflexibility. Rigid processes, under-digitised systems, and strained supply chains are not just hurting margins; they are obstructing innovation.
Paul Miller, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, who led the analysis of the data, put it plainly. “The world is moving fast,” he says. “Customers are moving fast. Every time you check your phone, someone somewhere has announced a new tariff, and it has disrupted all your plans. Lack of agility is a concern. It is keeping us awake at night.”
The cost of slowness
Agility is not a buzzword. It is the single most significant priority for manufacturing leaders, with 39 per cent of C-suite respondents naming it their number one organisational challenge. But while the symptom is clear, the causes are more complex. Top among them is the soaring cost of new product introduction (NPI), which is not only a financial burden but a drag on time to market, adaptability and competitiveness.
Getting a product from idea to launch is no longer a linear journey. It is a minefield of bottlenecks, testing loops, design iterations, quality issues, and supplier failures, each introducing cost and delay. Nearly half of respondents identify the high cost of NPI as their top concern. In North America and Latin America, it outpaces all other issues by a wide margin.
This burden is shared across all sectors, but its expression varies. In the automotive industry, NPI is felt as an economic threat. In the aerospace industry, the challenge is compounded by regulatory complexity and heightened sensitivity to supply chain disruptions. Both sectors agree, however, that poor collaboration and a lack of early-stage design integration are amplifying the problem.
“Products are developed to outperform predecessors and competitors,” Miller explains. “But getting them to market at scale and speed is increasingly difficult. It is not surprising that agility challenges dominate the top five issues manufacturers report. They are both the symptom and the cause.”
Supply chains are still too brittle
Supply chain fragility, long a known vulnerability, has become a critical impediment to agility. Two of the top three business challenges cited in the report relate directly to supply chain issues. Sixty per cent of respondents report difficulty in either sourcing parts or managing disruptions. Maritime chokepoints, resource scarcity, and shifting trade policies have only accelerated the sense of unpredictability.
Yet, it is not just about globalisation versus localisation. Rebuilding capacity in the West is not as simple as bringing jobs home. Modern manufacturing relies on deeply integrated supplier ecosystems, and reshoring is economically and technically complex. “The old jobs are not coming back,” Miller continues. “Closing a factory in China that employed 10,000 skilled workers is not going to be replaced with 10,000 Californians or Germans. You cannot afford to.”
Instead, manufacturers are pursuing a more pragmatic vision: automation-driven local capacity, digital visibility across suppliers, and collaboration that extends beyond the enterprise boundary. Investment is shifting accordingly. Supply chain management now tops the investment priority list, seen as either very important or critical by 70 per cent of respondents.
Digital maturity is the foundation for agility
If agility is the goal, digitalisation is the means, but the road is full of potholes. The report finds that 91 per cent of manufacturers face barriers to digital transformation. Most are internal. Too many analogue processes, poor data quality, fragmented systems, and a shortage of digital and automation skills are dragging down efforts to modernise.
This is particularly acute when it comes to digital twins. While 98 per cent of manufacturers recognise their value, 90 per cent report at least one barrier to adoption. The most common? Lack of real-time, real-world data from sensors and systems. Without this connection between the digital and the physical, digital twins are little more than sophisticated simulations.
“The problem is not building one digital twin of one thing,” Miller explains. “It is delivering that capability at scale across a fleet of assets, with continuous feedback from the real world. That is where most efforts falter, at the point where data becomes infrastructure.”
Compounding the issue is a widespread underinvestment in data integration. Only 22 per cent see the lack of a standard data fabric as a technical barrier, despite 63 per cent believing it would deliver transformational benefits. The industry recognises the symptoms but remains fragmented in its response.
AI is not a shortcut; it is an amplifier
Much of the recent focus has been on AI, and with good reason. Among high adopters, agility is less of a problem. The data shows a clear divide: only 23 per cent of high AI users cite agility as a key challenge, compared to 40 per cent of low AI users. Organisations already realising value from AI report improvements in quality, productivity, and responsiveness.
Yet AI is not a silver bullet. Its effectiveness depends entirely on digital readiness. Clean, structured data, interoperable systems, and workforce alignment are prerequisites. Otherwise, AI risks becoming another dashboard that tells you what you already know.
The strategic advantage of AI lies not just in prediction but in coordination. AI-enhanced design simulations, for instance, enable manufacturers to shift left, testing, iterating, and validating earlier in the development cycle. This reduces late-stage quality issues, shortens time to market and, crucially, lowers the cost of failure.
It is also changing the labour equation. AI is helping less-experienced staff do work once reserved for veterans. It enables real-time decision support, adaptive automation, and intelligent quality control. In this light, automation is not just a replacement for scarce talent; it is a force multiplier for the people already in place.
Collaboration is the missing thread
What ties all these challenges together is the persistent absence of effective collaboration. A full 97 per cent of manufacturers report some level of dysfunction in cross-team or cross-partner collaboration. Nearly three-quarters believe that better collaboration across design, engineering and manufacturing teams would improve agility. But knowing that collaboration is necessary and building systems that enable it are two very different things.
Collaboration technologies and strategies are emerging as quiet enablers of transformation. Investment here is not about more meetings; it is about integrating quality insights with design feedback, connecting supplier systems to in-house simulations, and breaking down the barriers between engineering silos. “Collaboration is not soft,” Miller says. “It is hard, structural, and measurable. It is about connecting design to inspection, simulation to production, and data to decisions. Without it, everything else suffers.”
From adaptation to anticipation
The report paints a nuanced but urgent picture. Agility is not about reacting faster. It is about building digital, organisational, and collaborative capacity to anticipate, align, and act. The real story behind the statistics is not that manufacturers are slow to change; it is that change is hard, mainly when rooted in infrastructure that was never designed to be adaptive.
Executives hoping to future-proof their operations should not mistake investment for transformation. The companies leading the way are those that treat agility not as an outcome but as a capability, one that requires digital maturity, data discipline, and cultural realignment.
The manufacturers best placed to thrive are not just those embracing AI or deploying automation. They are the ones laying the digital groundwork, connecting fragmented systems, investing in human-machine collaboration, and reimagining their organisations as learning systems.
In a world where every disruption is a test, agility is not a trend. It is survival strategy. And it begins with doing the unglamorous, technically difficult, but absolutely essential work of building a connected, data-driven, collaborative manufacturing enterprise.
