93% of manufacturers have MES, but only 23% have fully integrated it across their enterprise

Nearly every manufacturer on the planet now has a manufacturing execution system. Almost none of them have made it work at scale. That is the central finding of Rockwell Automation's "Scaling MES Across the Enterprise" report, released July 14, 2026, which surveyed 1,560 manufacturing and industrial operations decision-makers across 17 countries. According to PR Newswire, 93% of respondents have MES running in at least one facility, yet only 28% have deployed it enterprise-wide, and a mere 23% report full integration across ERP, PLM, quality, and operational technology systems.

The gap between deployment and integration is not a technical footnote. It is where operational value disappears. MES were originally designed to monitor, track, document, and control the conversion of raw materials into finished goods on the factory floor, as Manufacturing Dive reported. But the function has expanded well beyond production tracking into quality management, worker productivity, and supply chain forecasting. When those systems remain siloed, manufacturers are running an expensive information infrastructure that delivers a fraction of its potential.

Integration is both the goal and the bottleneck

The survey data reveals a self-reinforcing bind. According to PR Newswire, 44% of manufacturers rank integration as their top MES buying requirement when evaluating new or upgraded systems. At the same time, 33% cite MES as their single biggest data integration problem during modernization efforts. Organizations are buying for the outcome they cannot yet achieve, while the legacy architecture they are working around keeps blocking the path.

IDC associate research director Lorenzo Veronesi, whose firm contributed context to the report, noted that organizations risk leaving significant value on the table when disconnected systems and underutilized data go unaddressed, given that integration now ranks as both the top buying requirement and the leading modernization challenge, according to PR Newswire. The implication for procurement and operations leaders is direct: evaluating MES vendors purely on feature sets without auditing the integration architecture first is a known route to repeating the same problem at greater cost.

AI ambitions are running ahead of data reality

The integration gap has a compounding effect on manufacturers' AI strategies. Per the Rockwell Automation report, manufacturers expect 42% of their processes to be AI-supported within the next year, rising to 54% by 2030. But 43% of the same respondents acknowledge they are not effectively using the data they already collect. AI depends entirely on clean, connected, accessible data. A manufacturer that has not solved its MES integration problem has not solved its AI readiness problem either.

This dynamic creates a practical sequencing question for operations and IT leaders: investing in AI tooling before resolving data fragmentation across MES, ERP, and OT systems is likely to produce limited returns. The Rockwell report frames enterprise-wide MES integration as the prerequisite step, not a parallel workstream.

Cyber incidents are now reshaping buying criteria

Security pressure is adding urgency to decisions that might otherwise be deferred. According to PR Newswire, 46% of manufacturers experienced a cyber incident in the past year. The operational consequence is visible in procurement priorities: security and compliance now rank as the second-highest MES buying requirement, cited by 43% of respondents. For facilities operating with partially integrated or disconnected systems, the attack surface is wider and incident containment is harder, since there is no unified operational view from which to detect and respond.

The combination of cyber risk and unintegrated systems is reframing MES from an operational efficiency tool into a resilience and risk management platform. That shift changes how the business case gets built and who owns the conversation internally, moving it closer to the CISO and away from the plant floor alone.

What scaled MES looks like in practice

Kumi North America, a Tier 1 automotive supplier specializing in injection-molded interior plastics and assemblies, offers one concrete reference point. The company first implemented Rockwell's Plex platform in 2008 and has since expanded it across facilities in the United States and Canada, most recently adding Plex MES Automation and Orchestration capabilities, according to PR Newswire. The Kumi case reflects the multi-year commitment that enterprise-wide MES scaling typically requires, and why initial deployment figures tell only part of the story.

Rockwell's vice president of product management, Anthony Murphy, described the shift in MES function in the report: the system has moved from production tracking to providing insights across a company's full operations, including quality management, worker productivity, and supply chain forecasting, per PR Newswire. That broader scope makes the integration challenge more consequential, not less. Every disconnected system is a blind spot in that operational picture.

The report's full methodology covers hardware, software, and services decision-makers across discrete, process, and hybrid manufacturing sectors in 17 countries. Rockwell's next data point to watch: whether the 23% full-integration figure moves meaningfully by the time the company publishes its next annual State of Smart Manufacturing benchmark, which previously tracked AI adoption expectations alongside MES maturity metrics.