Manufacturers gain confidence as supply chain visibility remains the weak link

Manufacturers have spent the past few years trying to build more dependable supply networks, and the latest evidence suggests those efforts are beginning to pay off. Yet the message from Parsec’s 2026 State of the Manufacturing Industry report is not one of victory, but of cautious progress: confidence has improved, but so has awareness of how exposed many operations still are.

The report found that 71% of manufacturing leaders now describe their supply chain operations as re...

silient, up sharply from 50% two years ago. Confidence in day-to-day preparedness has also strengthened, with 66% saying they feel extremely or very ready to deal with current supply chain problems, an eight-point increase from 2024. Those gains appear to reflect a broad mix of responses to a more volatile environment, including stronger supplier relationships, wider sourcing strategies, greater use of supply chain management software and higher inventory holdings.

According to Parsec, 58% of respondents said they had invested in efforts to deepen supplier ties, while 44% had worked to diversify their networks. Another 58% reported adopting targeted technologies such as supply chain management systems, and 53% said they had increased stock on hand to soften the impact of disruptions upstream and downstream.

The report suggests that manufacturers are increasingly treating resilience as a system-wide discipline rather than a narrow procurement exercise. That means combining operational changes with relationship management and digital tools, rather than relying on any single fix. The broader picture, however, shows that the industry is still wrestling with a long list of threats that can emerge from almost any direction.

Among the most frequently cited pressures were shortages of materials and price swings, named by 33% of respondents, followed by transport and logistics problems at 31%. Geopolitical tensions were identified by 30%, while natural disasters were mentioned by 25%. Strikingly, only 1% of those surveyed said they had made it through the previous year, from February 2025 to February 2026, without encountering a supply chain disruption of any kind.

The most significant challenge, though, was not a shortage, a strike or a storm. It was visibility. Thirty-four per cent of respondents said poor insight into increasingly complex networks was one of the biggest barriers to stability. That finding matters because many of the other problems manufacturers face can only be managed effectively if they are spotted early enough to trigger a response.

In practice, that means spotting warning signs in data on delays, weather, commodity prices and factory performance before those signals become production losses. Parsec’s report argues that many organisations are still too limited in what they can see, even as they invest in tools designed to improve execution. The survey found that only 35% of manufacturers have foundational operational data systems such as MES, QES or CMMS in place, and only slightly more have unified, data-led strategies.

Artificial intelligence is also becoming more common in the sector, but adoption appears uneven. While 72% of leaders said they use AI in some part of their operations, only 10% reported standardised use across the enterprise. That gap points to a familiar manufacturing problem: interest in digital tools is high, but consistent deployment remains difficult.

Respondents cited cost, security and integration complexity as the main reasons standardised adoption has lagged. Two in five pointed to each of those obstacles. Yet the report implies that delaying those investments may be more expensive in the long run, particularly when disruption can ripple quickly from one part of the supply chain to another.

That argument is echoed by wider industry analysis. S&P Global has said supply chain resilience in 2026 is being shaped by continued geopolitical risk, tariffs and climate pressures, with trade flows becoming more fragmented and sourcing more regionally concentrated. Deloitte, meanwhile, said in its 2026 manufacturing outlook that US producers need renewed strategic focus and more targeted technology spending after a difficult 2025, noting that 80% of executives plan to allocate at least 20% of improvement budgets to smart manufacturing.

Parsec’s own wider research points in the same direction. The company has reported that 76% of manufacturers have rolled out digital transformation programmes across multiple departments, and that 71% say those efforts have produced positive results. Even so, 31% of firms that have completed such programmes are still collecting most or all of their data manually, underscoring how uneven the transition remains.

The broader conclusion is that resilience is no longer simply about absorbing shocks after they happen. Manufacturers are now trying to build the ability to anticipate them, interpret them and act on them quickly. That requires not just better software or bigger inventories, but connected information across the factory floor, logistics network and supplier base.

As Justin Bastawrose, technical enablement director at Parsec, argues in the report, supply chain management platforms can help companies execute decisions they have already made, but they do not by themselves provide the insight needed to make the next one. In a market defined by volatility, that distinction may determine whether firms merely cope with disruption or are able to get ahead of it.

Source: Noah Wire Services