While businesses are generally positive about future growth, recent McKinsey research reports that manufacturing growth rates and new orders eased at the end of 2025. The result is more pressure on manufacturing firms to improve customer experiences and build a reliable consumer base.
But this is not an easy task. Growing global competition, rising costs, labor shortages and increasing consumer expectations are now exposing long-standing weaknesses across operations, maintenance processes and supply chains.
To improve reliability, efficiency and long-term performance, it’s not enough for companies to simply recognize these challenges. Instead, solving manufacturing pain points requires organizations to understand what they are, why they persist and how they impact operations at scale.
Top pain points in manufacturing
1. Unplanned downtime and equipment failures
First up are unplanned machine downtime and equipment failures.
Downtime may be caused by circumstances beyond a company’s control, such as power outages or environmental disasters. It may also be tied to user errors, interoperability issues or improper documentation.
Asset failures, meanwhile, may be tied to aging equipment or deferred maintenance, which can lead to an overreliance on corrective or reactive maintenance that only occurs in response to emergencies.
The impacts of unplanned downtime and equipment failures include:
- Monetary costs are tied to lost output, labor inefficiency and the need for expedited shipping.
- Lack of visibility into asset health makes it more difficult for teams to pinpoint root causes.
- Reduced customer satisfaction and missed delivery commitments can reduce total revenue.
2. Maintenance inefficiencies and reactive work
Manufacturing maintenance often falls into two broad categories: Firefighting culture and planned operations.
Firefighting-based maintenance is purely responsive. When equipment breaks down, teams take action to identify, contain and resolve issues. Planned operations are proactive. They use a combination of historic and real-time data to predict likely failure points and solve them in advance.
Proactive processes are naturally more cost-effective, but several components conspire to make this challenging.
- Poor maintenance planning and production scheduling
- Limited use of condition monitoring or predictive tools
- Inconsistent procedures or documentation
- Difficulty balancing maintenance work with production demands
Taking a reactive approach puts technicians in a constant cycle of emergency work. When teams are focused on responding to breakdowns, preventive maintenance gets pushed aside—leading to more failures, more unplanned downtime and increased workload over time.
3. Skilled labor shortages and workforce challenges
There’s a growing skills gap in manufacturing. As noted by Forbes, more than 450,000 manufacturing jobs went unfilled in 2025, and this number is expected to climb for the next five years. In part, this change is tied to the retirement of experienced technicians and operators. Training gaps in advanced technologies also play a role: If companies don’t have the time and resources available to keep staff skills current, production efficiency suffers.
The first workforce challenge caused by this skills gap is a loss of tribal knowledge. This is the institutional information carried by experienced employees—the staff who know exactly how machines work, why they fail and can get them up and running again ASAP. When experienced staff leave, their knowledge leaves with them.
Skills shortages can increase the need for overtime and external support. Managing these resources effectively is important, as maintaining consistent training and clear processes helps ensure operational efficiency and compliance across all work.
Finally, a lack of skilled labor can create safety risks tied to understaffing or inexperience. Well-meaning employees can inadvertently put other staff members at risk or accidentally trigger unplanned downtime.
4. Rising operating and maintenance costs
Operating and maintenance costs are also on the rise, meaning there’s an ever-smaller gap between revenue and profit.
Contributing factors include:
- Inflation and rising material costs
- Emergency repairs
- Premium freight pricing
- Excessive spare parts inventory levels
- Inconsistent inventory management
- Poor asset utilization
- Cost of compliance, safety incidents and downtime
While higher industrial maintenance costs can be partially mitigated by more efficient processes, even small amounts of unexpected downtime can put revenue projections at risk.
5. Poor asset visibility and data silos
Data drives manufacturing industry decisions. Limited asset visibility and the existence of data silos, however, make it difficult to collect, analyze and apply data at scale.
Common causes of visibility and data issues include:
- Fragmented systems, such as CMMS, EAM and spreadsheets that aren’t interoperable
- Lack of sensors and IIoT devices to collect real-time equipment performance data
- Inconsistent data collection practices
- Limited analytics or KPI tracking
- The creation of departmental data silos prevents business teams, floor managers and maintenance technicians from sharing insights
This puts manufacturers in a difficult position: While they have an abundance of data, they struggle to turn this information into actionable insights.
6. Production inefficiencies and low OEE
Inefficient production practices can reduce overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), which creates a compound effect: Unexpected downtime leads to limited equipment availability that causes performance losses. This cycle repeats until the root causes of downtime are identified and addressed.
Production process inefficiencies are often tied to frequent changeovers and long setup times that limit equipment availability. They also stem from inconsistent documentation and startup processes that create potential safety gaps. In addition, poor coordination between maintenance and production teams can negatively impact OEE.
At best, production inefficiencies lead to speed losses that reduce total output or quality control issues that lead to reworks. At worst, they create the conditions for unplanned downtime that require significant time and resources to resolve.
7. Safety, compliance and regulatory pressure
Safety remains a persistent pain point for manufacturers. Worker safety is paramount to limit staff burnout, reduce the risk of employee churn and remain compliant with evolving regulations.
The dynamic nature of manufacturing environments, however, makes industrial safety a moving target. Potential pitfalls include:
- Challenges with OSHA compliance requirements
- Inadequate safety training
- Unsafe equipment conditions
- Poor lockout/tagout execution
- Incident documentation gaps
Failure to meet safety expectations can lead to fines, audits and damage to business reputation.
8. Supply chains and spare parts challenges
According to Deloitte, inflation and economic uncertainty top the list of supply chain disruptions.
This creates multiple issues, including:
- Long lead times for critical components
- Obsolete or hard-to-source parts
- Overstocked or understocked storerooms
- Lack of spare parts criticality analysis
- Difficulties in MRO spare parts planning
- Increased risks of extended downtime due to unavailable parts
9. Technology adoption and digital transformation barriers
Last but not least are challenges around the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies and the digital transformation it requires. Some often-cited issues include:
- Connecting legacy systems and infrastructure to new frameworks
- Integration challenges between platforms
- Change management resistance
- Lack of internal expertise
- Difficulty demonstrating ROI
- Fear of operational disruption during implementation
How manufacturers are addressing these pain points
Addressing these issues requires multiple strategies, such as:
- Prioritizing the transition to preventive and predictive maintenance
- Implementing reliability-centered maintenance (RCM)
- Deploying condition monitoring tools and sensors
- Training and upskilling workers
- Standardizing processes and documentation
- Improving data integration and analytics
- Building strategic partnerships for maintenance support
Overcoming operational pain points
Operational pain points aren’t going anywhere. Changing market conditions paired with staffing shortages, evolving compliance requirements and increasing regulatory pressure will continue to impact manufacturing companies over both the short and long term.
Effectively addressing these issues requires a combination of in-house ownership and outsourced support. As an industry leader in maintenance and reliability operations, ATS can help manufacturers reduce unplanned downtime, close workforce gaps, implement predictive technologies, improve asset performance, and lay the groundwork for safer, more resilient operations.
Take a proactive approach to pain point processes with ATS. Let’s talk.
References
Business Wire. (2025, March 19). New MHI and Deloitte report focuses on orchestrating end-to-end digital supply chain solutions. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250319048739/en/New-MHI-and-Deloitte-Report-Focuses-on-Orchestrating-End-to-End-Digital-Supply-Chain-Solutions
McKinsey & Company. (2026, April). McKinsey global economics intelligence. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/global-economics-intelligence
Shunina, D. (2025, August 28). How AI is solving America’s $1 trillion manufacturing labor crisis. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/dariashunina/2025/08/28/how-ai-is-solving-americas-1-trillion-manufacturing-labor-crisis/
