Michael UngarCEO of the Industry 4.0 Club

Small Manufacturers: Scaling Innovation with Common Platforms

28 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief segment, the speaker highlights a key advantage that small and medium manufacturers enjoy over larger corporations: the ability to maintain common foundational platforms across multiple production sites. With only four manufacturing locations, the company can easily scale innovations because new solutions built on the shared platform can be deployed without extensive integration work. The speaker contrasts this with the difficulty faced by global enterprises that often operate numerous disparate ERP systems, making the rollout of new innovations cumbersome and resource‑intensive. The overall message encourages smaller manufacturers to leverage their platform uniformity as a strategic strength.

Chapters

One of the benefits that we have as a smaller manufacturer that some larger companies don't have is it helps to have common foundational platforms. And because we're a company with basically 4 manufacturing sites, we can scale and have consistent foundational platforms across all of those facilities. And then because of that, right now, if we develop a new innovation that's on top of one of those, then the ability to pick it up and move it is relatively easy. Right? It doesn't require interfacing to a bunch of new systems and so forth. And again, obviously for larger companies, and I know from experience that can be a challenge if you have a global company and you have 10 different ERPs across the company as an example, right? Yeah. And that's a hard lift sometimes. So that is one of the things that the small and medium manufacturers should have going for them that they should take advantage of.