Your transformation might be one spreadsheet away from failure.

At a high level, transformation may appear well managed: a new ERP roadmap, connected factories, automation, data platforms, and several AI pilots suggest that we are making progress. However, production performance still often relies on increasing exceptions, integrations, and manual workarounds between IT systems and the shop floor.

The challenge is not digital change itself, but the increasing complexity that accompanies it. Each temporary workaround, unique routing rule, spreadsheet-based planning fix, and point-to-point integration adds to this burden. Over time, the organisation shifts from scaling on a solid foundation to relying on accumulated compromises, which results in longer lead times, more unplanned downtime, slower responses to demand changes, and higher quality costs.

When transformation becomes a tower

Executives appropriately focus on growth, speed to market, customer experience, and resilience. However, in manufacturing, the technology landscape often evolves reactively due to plant acquisitions, locally optimised MES instances, urgent traceability requirements, and the fact that production lines cannot be updated as easily as software. This leads to a transformation that appears coherent in presentations but is fragile in practice, with weak handoffs between ERP, MES, SCADA, quality systems, and suppliers.

The reality is that an organisation can be cloud-first, data-rich, and exploring AI, yet remain operationally vulnerable. A single supplier disruption, interface failure, or poorly managed change can cause line stoppages, missed OTIF, scrap, rework, or delayed shipments, as critical dependencies often remain hidden until they fail.

The spreadsheet problem (and why it matters)

You can find the Excel file at the bottom. Reliance on spreadsheets often signals underlying issues. In manufacturing, key decisions are still managed through spreadsheets, emails, and whiteboards, including production schedules, capacity checks, downtime logs, maintenance plans, quality holds, and inventory reconciliations, particularly during critical periods. While this approach can be pragmatic, if unmanaged, it creates single points of failure and governance gaps, with unclear ownership, poor version control, limited auditability, and increased operational, safety, and compliance risks.

The goal is not to eliminate all manual steps immediately. Instead, organisations should identify operational fragilities and determine whether they are building resilience or simply adding new technology to outdated processes. This distinction is strategic. Digital transformation should enhance the organisation’s ability to adapt, scale, and recover under pressure.

In practice, it means asking sharper, non-technical questions that expose operational reality:

• Where are our line-stopping dependencies (systems, interfaces, people) and are they documented, owned, and tested?

• Which “temporary” planning, quality, or maintenance workarounds have become permanent controls?

• What fails first under pressure: quarter close, a cyber incident, a plant changeover, or a supplier shock?

• Are we simplifying the OT/IT landscape, or just making it more expensive and riskier to change?

If these questions cannot be answered clearly, transformation efforts may be underway but have not yet become strategic.

Simplification is a leadership decision.

Simplification rarely occurs by chance. It requires executive discipline, cross-functional alignment, and a commitment to discontinuing practices that no longer add value, such as retiring legacy systems, standardising platforms, redesigning processes, and eliminating custom exceptions that increase costs and risks.

For CxOs, transformation is an executive responsibility rather than solely an IT initiative. The objective is not to expand the digital stack, but to create an organisation that is easier to operate, adapt, and sustain.

Five signals your transformation is adding fragility

• OEE, OTIF, or yield relies on offline files, manual reconciliations, or “heroic effort” every week.

• Genealogy/traceability breaks when one interface or site-specific workaround fails.

• Lead times for plant or process change are rising even as technology spend increases.

• You run too many variants: site-specific master data, bespoke routings, and point-to-point integrations.

• Resilience tests expose “hidden critical” systems that were never designed for 24/7 operations.

A better transformation mindset

Successful manufacturing transformations consistently reduce complexity while increasing capability. These organisations distinguish between activity and progress and treat architecture, process design, and operational resilience as board-level priorities, as these factors determine whether improvements in throughput, quality, and cost-to-serve can scale across plants.

If a modern technology stack rests on fragile foundations, it will ultimately limit the business it was intended to support. The CxO priority should be to reduce unnecessary components rather than add more.

At your next transformation steering committee, set a measurable goal for reducing complexity, such as 20 to 30 per cent. Select one value stream or flagship plant to demonstrate progress. Assign executive owners to address the top three sources of fragility, such as interfaces, master data, planning workarounds, or quality holds. Ask the team what activities, systems, reports, controls, or exceptions could be discontinued to accelerate change and reduce line stoppages. Hesitation shows which areas need attention.