Your AI spend is measurable. So is the part of it that never reached the floor.
Infor surveyed manufacturers on where AI investment turns into output, and where it stalls. The ones who closed the output and stall gap report 35–50% productivity gains.
Five things push a plant into the void
Most manufacturers are already spending on AI and automation. Few are seeing the return they modelled. The research traces almost all of it back to the same five conditions.
Disconnected from strategy
| Technology gets deployed to build a capability, not to fix a named operational problem with an owner and a due date. |
A widening digital divide
| Some manufacturers have moved to production. Others are still piloting. The distance between the two groups compounds every quarter. |
Hype you can't filter
| Every vendor claims the same outcome. Leaders have no reliable way to tell a working solution from a demo. |
Nothing meaningful being measured
Without KPIs tied to output, no one can prove value was created — or find where it leaked.
Legacy and over-customized systems
| Old ERP, or a cloud platform customized until it can't be upgraded. Adoption slows to the speed of the software, not the business. |
How an over-customized ERP quietly compounds
One decision at the top. Five costs that keep charging, year after year.
Legacy, over-customized systems
Years of one-off customizations and bolt-ons harden into a system nobody can upgrade without a project.
When demand, supply or regulation moves, the system can't move with it. Every change queues behind a development backlog measured in quarters.
Process mining, RPA and AI agents need clean, standard workflows to read. Customization is exactly what they can't interpret, so the new capability stalls at the pilot.
Each acquisition brings another system with it. The same part number ends up meaning three different things in three different databases, and nobody owns the reconciliation.
Scheduling, costing and service each work from their own version of the numbers. Decisions get argued in the meeting instead of made before it.
Every gap gets a patch, and every patch needs maintaining. Budget that should fund new capability funds upkeep of the system that created the gap.
That maintenance spend never reaches the root cause. It funds the very system that opened the gap, and the cycle starts again.
What High Performers Do Differently?
The top performing group in the research isn't running different technology. It's running the same technology against a named business outcome — and measuring it.
35-50%
productivity gain among high performers
90%
less tracking workload after automated anomaly detection
40%
lower service costs
Where the gain actually comes from
Not from AI bolted on beside the ERP. From AI inside it, automating decisions rather than keystrokes.
Tracking Workload
Demand shifts get caught before they become problems
Anomalies surface automatically instead of being found in a weekly review.
Service Cost
The right part goes out on the first visit
Combilift cut service cost by letting AI recommend the part before the truck is loaded.
Frontline
Answers, not another dashboard
People on the floor ask a question and get something they can act on, without interpreting a report first.
Infor customers use AI to automate their processes and lower the inventory cost
Start with the process, not the product
The single widest split between high and low performers in the research is whether anyone has defined clear, meaningful KPIs. The Industry Process Catalog is how we close that on day one: we map how your processes run today, then tie each gap to a requirement.
• Ties every digital investment to a business outcome, not a vendor roadmap.
• Turns operational gaps directly into technology requirements.
• Flags the manual steps that should have been automated years ago.
• Shows how your processes actually run today measured by process mining.
Share of manufacturers who agree: “We have established clear key performance indicators to assess performance and productivity gains.”
Even among the leaders, barely half can point to a KPI that tracks productivity gains.
Ready to Close Your Value Void?
You already know which of your processes runs on workarounds. Access to the report and see what the plants that fixed theirs did differently, and how they proved it paid.
