(Hexagon: North Kingstown, RI) -- Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence business area has announced new research showing a gap between how manufacturers describe their operations and what’s actually happening on the production floor. Most manufacturers consider themselves connected, but responses around feedback loops, quality, and lost time tell a different story.

The State of Manufacturing Report 2026, commissioned by Hexagon and conducted by Dynata*, surveyed 511 professionals working in U.S. manufacturing, from entry-level workers to the C-suite. Three-quarters (77%) describe their operations as fully or mostly connected, and 40% say they’re connected across design, production, quality, and business systems. However, 39% report limited feedback between design, manufacturing, and quality teams, and 67% don’t have data from most systems integrated into a single view.

“Manufacturers aren’t wrong when they say they’re connected,” says Steve Ilmrud, VP of operations, North America, Stationary Metrology Division, Hexagon. “However, connected and integrated are two different things. Companies confident in their connectivity are still finding quality problems late and losing expertise between teams, and both of those get more expensive as production scales. What separates the manufacturers pulling ahead is that they went looking for the handoff where information stops moving, and they fixed that one first.”

Key findings

Leadership and the shop floor describe different factories

Confidence around data integration concentrates at the top of the org chart and decreases farther down to the shop floor. In the widest single divide in the research, 80% of executives say their data is integrated, compared to 33% of the shop floor.

Confidence in adapting to major disruptions like uncertainty and outages follows the same pattern, from 91% in the executive suite down to 62% among entry-level workers. Nearly a third of executives (31%) say their plant already runs lights-out somewhere in the operation, but only 10% of their own senior managers agree.

Where the disconnection costs the most

The cost of disconnected data largely falls on quality, where 43% say rework disrupts production schedules and 42% catch quality problems too late to act on them efficiently. Two-thirds (67%) lose six or more hours a week to measurement and inspection bottlenecks, and 35% lose 11 hours or more.

Inspection moved closer to production, but the data has not caught up
Now 59% of manufacturers inspect on or near the shop floor, and only 15% remain mostly or entirely lab based. However, the results often stay inside quality reports rather than reaching the production teams and design engineers who could act on them, which leaves manufacturers identifying defects after they happen instead of using quality data to prevent them.

How Hexagon helps manufacturers close the gap

Manufacturers are being asked to grow several times over while holding costs down. They can’t build factories or hire people that fast, so their option is to operate more efficiently with the workforce and equipment already in the building. Hexagon’s approach is to connect design, production, quality, automation, and operational data so that information moves between teams rather than staying trapped with whoever produced it.

*Dynata survey of 511 professionals working in U.S. manufacturing, conducted in July 2026