Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Digital Solution Fails: Smart Investment is the Key

14 Nov 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:15

In this segment, the speaker argues that many digital solutions fail not because the software itself is inadequate, but because organizations neglect to invest in the surrounding change‑management activities. He emphasizes that a successful rollout requires allocating budget for personnel retraining, process refactoring, and backfilling current roles so staff can become system champions. He illustrates the point with a recent global Manufacturing Execution System (MES) rollout, where the manufacturer deliberately budgeted for plant‑level backfill positions to enable employees to champion the new system, ensuring long‑term adoption and success.

Chapters

I will say another part of it that I think includes both of those points of the conversation is one of the reasons that so many digital solutions fail is lack of proper investments. And that's not saying, oh, you spent $1 million on a piece of software and you needed to spend $3 million on software. It's probably more something like, actually, you probably didn't need to spend that full million dollars on the software, but you needed to allocate another half million for personnel retraining and another half million for process refactoring and kind of the, all of the other things that your business is going to need to do around that digital solution to make it successful. I was talking to a manufacturer recently doing a big global MES rollout, and one of the most important things they talked about in their budget was their funding to allocate to individuals at each plant to backfill them for their current jobs so they could become the new champions of the MES system. So intentional investment every time they did a rollout to get people's time to make sure that they were there and embracing the change and influencing the project and continuing along and could champion that long term.