93% of Manufacturers Run MES, and 23% Have Integrated It
A survey of 1,560 decision makers across 17 countries finds MES almost universally deployed, rarely enterprise-wide, and named by a third of respondents as their single biggest data integration problem.
Rockwell Automation published its Scaling MES Across the Enterprise report on 14 July 2026, based on responses from 1,560 manufacturing and industrial operations decision makers across 17 countries. Fifty-eight percent came from organisations with over $1 billion in annual revenue and 54% described themselves as primary decision-makers.
The headline pair of numbers is the useful one. Ninety-three percent of manufacturers have a manufacturing execution system deployed, but only 28% have deployed it enterprise-wide, and just 23% report full integration across ERP, PLM, quality and operational technology systems. Forty-four percent rank integration as their top MES buying requirement, 33% name MES as their single biggest data integration problem, and 43% admit they use the data they collect ineffectively.
On the forward-looking side, 42% expect AI-supported processes within a year and 54% by 2030, while 46% experienced a cyber incident in the past year and 43% rank security and compliance as their second-highest buying requirement. Anthony Murphy, vice president of product management at Rockwell, characterised manufacturers as having "checked the box" on initial MES investment while struggling to gain full value across the enterprise.
The gap between owning an MES and having it connected is the whole story, and it is worth being precise about why it persists. An MES is usually bought for one plant, to solve one problem, by people responsible for that plant. Connecting it to ERP means agreeing on what a work order is across two systems that model it differently. Connecting it to quality means agreeing what a defect is. Connecting it to OT means somebody owning the tag naming across equipment installed over twenty years by different contractors. None of those are technical problems primarily, which is why buying more software rarely fixes them.
The 43% who say they use their data ineffectively are describing the same thing from the other end. Data that cannot be joined to the order it belongs to, the batch it came from and the machine that made it is not analysable, however much of it there is.
Source: Rockwell Automation