The Hidden Infrastructure Challenge in Smart Manufacturing
Manufacturers across the process engineering industry are deep into their digital transformation journeys – expanding IoT deployments, integrating cloud platforms and layering AI into production environments. Yet the success of these initiatives depends on something less visible but absolutely critical: network performance.
The promise of more efficient production looms large, sharpened by broader market pressures, from increased regulation to fragile supply chains. However, many are discovering that plant connectivity can’t keep pace with the speed and scale of innovation. The result is a growing bandwidth bottleneck, one that can compromise uptime, reliability and safety.
The future of smart manufacturing won’t be determined by who has the most robots or AI algorithms. It will be determined by who builds a secure, unified and resilient network fabric capable of enabling those innovations at scale.
Manufacturers can’t rely on siloed solutions. They need one global, secure networking platform that can keep plants running, protect against disruption and bridge edge, cloud and core environments – let’s discuss why this is the case, and how network infrastructure is key to competitiveness.
Real-time manufacturing, real-time network
The factory floors of today have completely transformed as compared to those of the previous generation. No longer made up solely of heavy machinery and manual labour, they are now complex digital environments where smart sensors, robotics, digital twins and remote operations function side by side. Each of these tools generate vast quantities of data, all of which must be collected and transmitted reliably and securely across sites and systems for monitoring and analysis.
Röchling Automotive’s 40 globally distributed sites required a high performance, secure, and highly reliable network to ensure consistent operations, with downtime potentially costing millions of pounds per day. This is just one example of the critical nature of connectivity. Industrial machines can produce gigabytes of data daily, with a modern smart factory potentially relying on hundreds of such systems. For manufacturers, having network systems that can scale and adapt to meet these requirements is necessary.
If data cannot move quickly enough to support predictive maintenance, real-time analytics or safety monitoring, operations grind to a halt. The ability to sustain these capabilities ultimately depends on the resilience of the underlying network.
Cloud evolution and new demands
As with many sectors, the initial wave of cloud adoption saw mass enthusiasm for offloading as much as possible to public providers. However, this approach has since matured, with manufacturers adopting multi cloud and hybrid strategies, weighing up which workloads belong in the cloud and which should remain closer to operations.
According to a recent cloud trends report, some organisations are shifting away from public cloud back into private or on-premise environments, often due to cost, performance or sovereignty issues. In Europe, GDPR and initiatives like GAIA-X amplify the need for sovereignty-aware strategies.
A growing trend is the rise of AI-implementations at the edge. Siemens and NVIDIA, for example, expanded their partnership recently to deliver AI-powered assistance for factory floor operations optimised to run on-premises, as well as to enable a new line of powerful, industrial PCs, designed to withstand heat, dust and vibration while supporting processes such as AI-based robotics and predictive maintenance.
All these factors create a more complex IT ecosystem that demands seamless connectivity between on-premises systems, edge deployments and the cloud environment chosen by the manufacturer. Many legacy networks weren’t initially designed to handle this level of interoperability.
Incompatibility, latency, and bandwidth limitations all present risks that could undermine even the most carefully laid out plans.
The infrastructure gap: a competitive risk
While discussions around manufacturing innovation often focus on robotics or AI, the less visible infrastructure challenge carries just as much weight. Without the right digital backbone, the potential of these technologies cannot be realised. If the network falters individual processes or even entire operations are jeopardised.
This is why the gap between infrastructure and capability is more than a technical issue, but a competitive risk. Manufacturers that are unable to modernise their connectivity will inevitably find themselves at a disadvantage compared to those that can. They may face longer downtime and missed opportunities, losing any competitive advantage despite large scale initiatives to gain one.
Closing the connectivity gap
The key to modern manufacturing transformation is connectivity. Manufacturers must think beyond applications and cloud strategies and address the fundamental role of network infrastructure in enabling any transformation initiative. Investment in low-latency, high-bandwidth connectivity is the foundation of performance.
Manufacturers and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can work together to design systems that can meet the ever-increasing demands of smart factories. System requirements, levels of security and scalability must all be considered from the outset, rather than treated as afterthoughts.
For the process and control community, this means viewing connectivity not just as IT infrastructure but as a core part of plant operations. Network performance directly affects process stability, data integrity and ultimately output quality.
The next phase of industrial transformation will belong to those who modernise their networks to deliver real-time, deterministic performance across control systems, edge and cloud. In doing so, they will unlock the full potential of digital manufacturing – safely, securely and without compromise.
