15th Manufacturing Transformation Summit

Roughly a quarter of the US manufacturing workforce is eligible to retire by 2030, and projections point to 1.5 to 2 million roles going unfilled by the early 2030s. The number that matters more is less public: how much of your plant’s real operating knowledge lives in the heads of people who will not be there in three years. Standard work rarely captures why the line runs best at a slightly odd setting on humid days. The operator who knows does.

In this workshop, we work through how to turn that tacit expertise into software before it walks out the door: capturing decision logic, setpoints and troubleshooting know-how in digital work instructions, knowledge models and AI assistants that new hires can use on their first shift. We then move to the operating model that follows, where fewer people supervise more automated processes and intervene by exception. Expect practical discussion of which roles to redesign first, how to measure time to competence, and how to keep experienced staff engaged in teaching the system rather than feeling replaced by it.

Unplanned downtime remains the most expensive line item that never appears on a P&L. Most plants carry hidden capacity losses of 30 to 45 percent of their theoretical potential, much of it unmeasured, and on a $20 million plant each recovered OEE point is worth several hundred thousand dollars of annual capacity. Predictive maintenance promises to claw a good share of that back. In practice, most programs stall on something unglamorous: the data is not there, not clean, or not connected to anything that can act on it.

In this workshop, we get specific about the foundation that has to exist before the algorithms earn their keep: which assets to instrument first and which to leave alone, how to bring sensor, CMMS and MES data into one usable model, and how to close the loop so a prediction becomes a work order rather than a dashboard nobody opens. We will look at how to prioritize by failure cost rather than by what is easiest to connect, how to set OEE targets that finance will underwrite, and what a realistic twelve-month path from reactive to predictive looks like in a brownfield plant.

Demand for locally made pharmaceutical products is surging, and few manufacturers have felt it as sharply as Hovione, whose US operations have more than doubled in size in four years. Growing that fast puts pressure on everything at once: sites, safety, structure and, above all, people.

In this one-to-one conversation, Roderick Hill, North America Operations, Business Transformation Leader & Operational Excellence Director at Hovione, draws on a career that runs from Procter & Gamble's lean, TPM-led culture through L'Oréal to Hovione. He shares what it takes to close the gap between the culture a company wants and the one it actually has. Expect a practical look at building high-performing, self-sufficient teams, why technical mastery from operator to manager is a competitive advantage, and what happens when you learn to run technology better than the customer who bought it.

A series of curated 30-minute meetings scheduled throughout the three-hour networking period, with breaks between sessions. Matches are arranged based on intelligence-led recommendations and mutual business interests.