Rockwell Automation report: 93% of manufacturers have MES, but only 23% have fully integrated it

Nearly every manufacturer on the planet has a manufacturing execution system. Almost none of them have made it work across the whole company. That is the central finding of Rockwell Automation's "Scaling MES Across the Enterprise" report, released July 14, 2026, and based on responses from 1,560 manufacturing and industrial operations decision-makers spanning 17 countries.

The numbers are stark. According to PR Newswire's release of the report, 93% of manufacturers have MES running in at least one facility. Yet only 28% have deployed it enterprise-wide, and just 23% report full integration across ERP, PLM, quality, and operational technology systems. The gap between deployment and genuine, end-to-end integration is where most manufacturers are stuck.

Integration is both the goal and the blocker

The report makes clear that integration is not just a technical wish-list item. According to PR Newswire, 44% of manufacturers rank integration as their top MES buying requirement when evaluating new or replacement systems. At the same time, 33% name MES as their single biggest data integration problem, meaning the same factor driving purchase decisions is also the hardest thing to actually solve after purchase.

Manufacturing Dive, reporting on the release, noted that MES systems monitor, track, document, and control the conversion of raw materials into finished goods on the factory floor. That core function is well understood, but reporter Nathan Owens highlighted that integrating separate, patchwork systems has become one of the biggest industry challenges, particularly as AI adoption and cyber risk both accelerate at the same time.

IDC associate research director Lorenzo Veronesi, quoted in the Rockwell Automation report via PR Newswire, described the stakes plainly: organizations that leave disconnected systems and underutilized data unaddressed risk leaving significant value on the table, with integration ranking simultaneously as the top buying requirement and the leading modernization challenge.

AI timelines are arriving before data foundations are ready

The integration gap has a compounding problem: AI expectations are already on the clock. Rockwell Automation's broader State of Smart Manufacturing research, cited in the report, shows manufacturers expect 42% of processes to be AI-supported within the next year and 54% by 2030. The timeline is aggressive.

The catch is that 43% of respondents acknowledge they are not effectively using the data they already collect, according to PR Newswire's summary of the report. AI depends on clean, connected, real-time data from across production, quality, and supply chain systems. If MES remains siloed at the site level, the data pipelines AI requires simply do not exist. Teams that have not solved integration will find themselves unable to operationalize AI investments regardless of how much they spend on models or platforms.

Cyber incidents are now an integration argument

Security is no longer a separate conversation from MES architecture. According to the report, as cited by PR Newswire, 46% of manufacturers experienced a cyber incident in the past year. That figure has pushed security and compliance to the second-highest MES buying requirement, named by 43% of respondents. Operations and IT teams evaluating MES modernization now have a direct business case to bring to leadership: siloed systems are not just operationally inefficient, they expand the attack surface.

For procurement and IT leadership, this reshapes vendor conversations. A system deployed in three plants with no integration to corporate ERP or quality management is not just leaving performance data stranded, it is creating a compliance and security liability that auditors and insurers will increasingly scrutinize.

How one Tier 1 supplier closed the gap over time

Kumi North America, a Tier 1 automotive supplier specializing in injection-molded interior plastics, offers a concrete example of incremental enterprise scaling. The company first implemented Rockwell Automation's Plex platform in 2008, according to PR Newswire, and has since expanded across facilities in the United States and Canada. Most recently, the supplier added Plex MES Automation and Orchestration capabilities to its footprint.

Paul Andrews, assistant vice president of systems at Kumi North America, described the starting point as operations that struggled to synchronize, with some locations running no software at all, per the PR Newswire announcement. The Plex infrastructure has since scaled alongside the business, with new capabilities layered in as the company's needs evolved. The case illustrates a point Rockwell Automation vice president of product management Anthony Murphy made in the same release: manufacturers winning at MES are not necessarily doing more than their peers, they are doing more things in a connected, unified way.

The full "Scaling MES Across the Enterprise" report, including recommended steps for closing the deployment-to-integration gap, is available directly from Rockwell Automation. For operations and IT leaders who have already justified the initial MES capital expenditure, the report's data makes the case that the harder, second investment, full enterprise integration, is where the return actually lives.