As industrial sectors like manufacturing, AEC, and asset management pursue greater efficiency, the adoption of digital tools continues to rise. As companies of all sizes move further along in their digital transformation, they are finding more efficient, more scalable, and more sustainable workflows to help meet growing demand. However, as anyone within these sectors would know first-hand, it’s not as simple as deciding to digitize and then taking simple, well-defined steps for guaranteed success. Every organization takes a different path, and for everyone there are challenges across the process that need to be met.
These challenges continue to evolve as time goes on and new tools are available to expand or kickstart this digitization process. To get a snapshot of where the industry is today, Hexagon recently released a “digital thread” report entitled Data Connectivity & Visibility: The Competitive Edge in Industry. The report includes insights from 400 decision-makers from organizations in “industrial business environments,” with organizations coming across manufacturing, oil & gas, and power, and all having annual revenues of over $1 billion. The surveys were completed between December 2024 and January 2025, and include respondents APAC, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America. You can download the entire 24-page report here, and below are a few of our biggest takeaways from the findings.
According to this report, there are a few factors that are still holding these large organizations back and define the need for greater digital adoption. The number one issue continues to be that project milestones are being missed, an unsurprising finding as missed deadlines have long been an issue across these sectors. Not far behind that problem was an inability to scale assets to meet growing demand, and unplanned production downtime. Contributing to these issues, according to respondents of the survey, are skills and knowledge gaps, manual processes remaining in place, and delayed or out-of-date information.
If these challenges sound familiar, it’s probably because it’s been the issues that industry leaders have been trying to solve with digital adoption for decades now. Respondents indicated continued investment into digital tools, with seven out of ten noting that they have increased the number of digital tools and data sources they used over the past calendar year. More than three-quarters said they “frequently or continuously” use visualization dashboards. However, on the flip side, two-thirds noted that they still frequently or continuously use paper-based information as well.
It goes without saying that the continued use of paper-based information leads to the challenges discussed above, particularly in terms of working with out-of-date or delayed information. It simply takes more time to update and distribute paper-based data flows rather than digital dashboards. This isn’t groundbreaking information, of course, so what are some of the challenges with this digital transformation? According to 56 percent of these organizational leaders, their organizations haven’t yet seen the return on investment that they’ve expected. Furthermore, 57 percent say the visualization platforms they use lack connectivity to each other. When you combine a relative lack of ROI that can be hard to sell to ultimate decision-makers, and a lack of connectivity that can frustrate the daily users, it’s easy to see how this digitization process continues to lack.
What’s perhaps most striking from this report is the indication that adding more of these digital tools could have some negative effects on their organizations. For example, 64 percent of respondents agreed that adding more of these tools “appears to affect stakeholder alignment.” Furthermore, 63 percent of respondents who had more tools than a year ago agree that their team spends too much time manually creating reports and consolidating data. On average, team members are spending 18.72 hours per week on these tasks, adding up to 117 working days per year.
While it’s clear that digitization is ultimately the path to greater efficiency for the industrial sector, this report also backs up the idea that it’s not as simple as snapping your finger, deciding to undergo a digital transformation, and then immediately reaping the benefits. The organizations polled for this report represent some of the biggest companies in the world, giving them tremendous buying power but also making them large organizations that can be difficult to change on a dime, particularly if the change is done without forethought.
The report, therefore, ultimately focuses on the idea of a “digital thread,” which they define as follows:
“An always-connected data flow from across an entire enterprise, providing continual intelligence on all operations and assets. This is made possible by a ‘digital backbone’ of platforms, tools and services that create a communication framework through which data can flow.”
In other words, it’s not necessarily about just adding tools that can solve individual problems, but rather finding a connected series of tools that can flow data seamlessly across an organization and truly enhance workers’ efforts rather than adding more work on top of it. As the report dives into, there are still barriers to adopting tools with this mindset, but ultimately, the most successful organizations will find a way to embrace and implement these digital threads.
