When it comes to the future of American manufacturing, Clark Dressen doesn’t mince words.
“Maintaining the status quo of where we are is not going to — you may be surviving today as a manufacturer, you may be profitable even, but we’re at that tipping point of saying, unless you’re able to adopt and embed some of these technologies, the chances that you become less competitive are pretty high,” he warned on a recent episode of the Augmented Ops podcast.
As the CTO of MXD, the nation’s hub for digital manufacturing and cybersecurity, Dressen is on the front lines of the effort to modernize the U.S. industrial base. And from his vantage point, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
“If you think about manufacturing today, we’ve got a great manufacturing base in the United States. We’re good at a lot of things, but a lot of those are really the legacy environments today,” he explained. “MXD, one of our roles is to really be the interface between manufacturers, suppliers, academics. We want to take research, we want to take emerging technologies, we want to find the right use cases to apply and then go get those embedded into manufacturing — really all about strengthening U.S. manufacturing, driving digital adoption into those manufacturing environments.”
Technology in and of itself doesn’t add any value, right? It’s technology applied to solve problems — technology applied to solve manufacturing problems in our focus areas.
But as Dressen is quick to point out, technology alone is not a silver bullet. The key, he argues, is to start with a clear understanding of the problems you’re trying to solve — whether it’s productivity, efficiency, or quality issues — and then look for the digital tools that can help address those challenges.
“When we go talk to whether it’s the OIB [organic industrial base] or some of our other manufacturers in our network, we’ll try to focus on, hey, what are the use cases of the technology?” he said. “Are you trying to solve productivity problems, efficiency problems, quality problems? And then really understanding the drive behind that — that’s how you’re eventually going to drive the adoption.”
Of course, in an industry as established as manufacturing, change doesn’t come easy. Dressen acknowledges the resistance that often greets new technologies, especially in environments where processes have been honed over decades.
But he also sees an opportunity for manufacturers to leverage digital tools not just to automate physical tasks, but to augment the cognitive work that goes into running a factory — things like material disposition, data flow, and supply chain visibility.
“What LLMs [large language models] do in this context is tremendous from a reasoning and logic perspective, not just automating the physical work,” he said. “I mean, that happened 20, 30 years ago, and it’s still making some gains, but automating the cognitive work — you know, how do you disposition material, who needs to be notified of this information, how does data flow across the whole of the system?”
Dressen is also quick to point out that modernization isn’t just about installing the latest software or robots. It’s about rethinking the entire manufacturing ecosystem, from the policies that govern it to the partnerships that sustain it.
Take cybersecurity, for example. With the recent rollout of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), manufacturers that handle classified information are now subject to a rigorous set of security requirements. But for smaller firms, the burden of compliance can be daunting.
“It’s absolutely challenging, especially for smaller companies,” Dressen said. “Your OEM, your big Fortune 50 companies, they’ve got entire teams who are focused on nothing but, ‘Hey, we’re going to go be CMMC compliant.’ For that 20- or 50-person company, not so easy. It’s going to be part of somebody’s time.”
To me, it’s a balance. You’ve got to have the policy to protect and to maintain, but then there’s a balance there of how do we make it accessible, especially for those small and mediums?
The answer, Dressen believes, lies in a more collaborative approach — one that brings together manufacturers, suppliers, academics, and policymakers to find ways to make compliance more streamlined and accessible, without sacrificing security.
The same goes for building resilience into the supply chain. While the dream of a single, standardized ERP system may be unrealistic, Dressen sees potential in using AI and other data tools to help manufacturers gain visibility into their networks and collaborate more effectively with their partners.
Ultimately, though, the key to modernizing the industrial base comes down to mindset. Manufacturers that embrace the opportunities of digital transformation — that lean into the challenge of rethinking their processes and their partnerships — are the ones that will thrive in the years ahead.
“It doesn’t necessarily take a huge capital investment,” Dressen said. “It doesn’t necessarily take having to add 20% to your workforce to go manage this. But it does take a strategic, purposeful approach to saying, ‘Hey, we need to really understand the basics of data foundation, integration of that data, and then layering on whether it’s digital twins, AI, even just analytics — really starting to apply some of these tools to understand your business, understand how you interact with others.'”
In other words? The future of American manufacturing is digital. The only question is who will lead the charge.
To learn more about how MXD is helping to modernize the U.S. industrial base, visit mxdusa.org. You can also hear Clark Dressen’s full conversation with host [name] on the Augmented Ops podcast.
