Agenda - Digital Manufacturing Strategies Summit USA

Draft agenda - subject to change

DAY ONE - Wednesday, 28th October 2026

07:45 - 08:30

REGISTRATION, REFRESHMENTS AND NETWORKING

08:30 - 08:40

Chair’s Welcome and Opening Remarks

THINK TANK CHALLENGES

The summit opens with our Think Tank Challenges. Attendees rotate through three 25-minute small-group discussions, exploring the industry challenges most relevant to them and sharing practical ideas and solutions with peers and industry experts.

08:45 - 09:10

Think Tank Challenge 1

Working Think Tank Challenge topics:

TABLE ONE
From Pilot to Plant: Scaling Digital Initiatives Successfully 
Explore strategies to transition from pilot projects to full-scale digital implementations.

TABLE TWO
Building Resilient Operations in a Disruptive Landscape 
Learn how to enhance operational agility amidst rapid industry changes.

TABLE THREE
Supply Chain Execution Systems: The Brains Behind the Bots
Why orchestration is now the real differentiator in warehouse automation. As warehouse automation becomes more advanced and interconnected, the competitive edge is shifting from the machines themselves to the software that makes them work together.

TABLE FOUR
Design Decides, Production Discovers: Can AI Close the Gap Between Design, Manufacturing & Quality?
Explore how AI and a digital thread can connect design intent to shop floor reality.

TABLE FIVE
Moving Manufacturing AI Pilots Successfully into Production: What Actually Scales
Why the AI pilot-to-production gap is an infrastructure, not an AI, problem: Identifying on which layer your transformation budget should focus. The hidden cost of managing AI and compute across distributed OT infrastructure & smaller plants: Service technicians, config drift, and dealing with security exposure regulators (CRA, NIS2, IEC 62443). IT/OT ownership in practice: Who actually operates edge fleets once the pilot team leaves, and how should you structure that hand-off? Sovereignty and data residency as a scaling constraint, not a compliance checkbox: What changes when the factory can’t send data to the cloud?

TABLE SIX

Cybersecurity in Smart Manufacturing 
Address the growing cybersecurity challenges in digital manufacturing.

TABLE SEVEN
Data-Driven Decision Making in Manufacturing 
Leverage data analytics to inform strategic decisions.

TABLE EIGHT
Sustainable Manufacturing: Achieving Green Goals 
Incorporate sustainability into manufacturing processes.

TABLE NINE
Workforce Transformation in the Digital Age 
Prepare your workforce for the demands of modern manufacturing.

TABLE TEN
Leveraging IoT for Operational Excellence 
Utilise IoT technologies to enhance manufacturing efficiency. 

TABLE ELEVEN
From Predictive Insight to Operational Impact:

Predictive maintenance tells you what might happen. Operational impact requires acting on it. For manufacturing leaders navigating complexity across sites, the real challenge isn’t just visibility, it’s execution.

This interactive think tank invites you to exchange perspectives on how to translate machine health insights into coordinated, measurable action across maintenance, operations, and leadership teams.

Rather than focusing on the technology alone, the discussion will explore the organizational capabilities required to move from isolated predictive-maintenance initiatives to a repeatable, enterprise-wide model for operational execution.

Together, we’ll explore what separates organizations that generate alerts from those that drive outcomes.

Discussion themes include:

Why predictive insights alone don’t reduce downtime

Connecting machine health data to maintenance planning, scheduling, and production decisions

Aligning reliability, operations, and finance around measurable impact

Overcoming adoption barriers at all levels

Building a scalable model that moves from reactive to condition-based and predictive execution

TABLE TWELVE
Advanced Robotics and Automation 
Explore the integration of robotics into manufacturing workflows.

09:15 - 09:40

Think Tank Challenge 2

Think Tanks Challenge topics repeated as above

09:45 - 10:10

Think Tank Challenge 3

Think Tanks Challenge topics repeated as above

10:10 - 10:35

COFFEE AND NETWORKING

10:35 - 11:00

OPENING KEYNOTE

Leading Change in the Digital Factory

Digital transformation is about more than technology—it’s about bringing people along on the journey. This session explores how effective change management helps manufacturers build stakeholder buy-in, overcome resistance, align operations and IT, and drive lasting adoption.

You’ll gain practical strategies for engaging teams, securing executive support and ensuring digital investments deliver measurable operational improvements.

Key takeaways:

Why people—not technology—are often the biggest determinant of digital transformation success.
Strategies for gaining buy-in across operations, engineering, IT and leadership.
Common change management pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Practical methods for driving adoption while maintaining operational performance.
Building a culture that supports continuous digital innovation rather than one-time technology deployments.

Hashmat Siddiqui, Head of Tech & Digital Innovation, GSK

Meeting session 1

11:05 - 11:30

CASE STUDY

Applying Agentic AI for Maintenance, Repair, and Operations (MRO) in Smart Manufacturing

Applying effective MRO lifecycle data in optimising hardware and technology performance across the manufacturing sector.
How are data quality issues undermining real-time asset management and maintenance workflows in manufacturing operations.
Uncovering agentic AI-driven tools which resolve reliability data gaps and improve margin gains

Meeting session 2

11:35 - 12:00

CASE STUDY

Leading Change in the Digital Factory

You’ll gain practical strategies for engaging teams, securing executive support and ensuring digital investments deliver measurable operational improvements.

Key takeaways:

Why people—not technology—are often the biggest determinant of digital transformation success.
Strategies for gaining buy-in across operations, engineering, IT and leadership.
Common change management pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Practical methods for driving adoption while maintaining operational performance.
Building a culture that supports continuous digital innovation rather than one-time technology deployments.

Meeting session 3

12:05 - 12:30

DATA CASE STUDY

Generate value and create optimized visualizations to build a secure and robust ecosystem for your organization’s data

Key takeaways:

Reduce production costs by quickly and accurately identifying production bottlenecks.

Increase production quality by exploring key indicators on the factory floor.

Ensure environmentally impactful planning by guaranteeing compliance with protocols.

Enhance the productive capacity of the factory floor by discovering process opportunities through data.

Tiago Machado
Co-Founder, ST-One

Meeting session 4

12:30 - 13:30

NETWORKING LUNCH

13:30 - 13:55

CASE STUDY

Manage both plant operations and energy efficiency through one connected platform

Key takeaways:

Build margin improvement and operational visibility with key metrics such as machine runtime and production

Increase operational sustainability and reduce energy costs with real-time visibility into energy efficiency

Drive continuous improvement, informed by accurate data across the entire plant operation, towards more data driven, sustainable operations.

Lauren Dunford, CEO & Co-Founder, Guidewheel

Meeting session 5

14:00 - 14:25

CASE STUDY

The Waste That Lean Manufacturing Couldn't Eliminate - Until AI and Digital Transformation

Manufacturers generate more operational data than ever before, yet continuous improvement teams still spend too much time collecting information, producing reports and documenting problems instead of solving them. This session examines how AI-enabled tools and connected manufacturing platforms can streamline continuous improvement by automating routine analysis, reducing reporting burdens and uncovering opportunities to eliminate waste. Learn how manufacturers are using internally developed digital solutions to strengthen governance, standardise improvement practices, accelerate implementation cycles and equip a new generation of employees with the capabilities needed to improve productivity across multiple manufacturing sites.

Mohamad Sadek
Global Head of Continuous Improvement for natural Ingredients Division, Givaudan

Meeting session 6

14:30 - 14:55

CASE STUDY

The blind spot in your AI strategy

If your factory is built to stop, you won’t get Physical AI to run.

Most factories in 2026 must halt production to deploy a configuration change, an integration or an AI model. This can cost up to $2 million per stop.
Physical AI raises the stakes: it consumes live machine state, in real time and bidirectionally. Physical AI cannot run on an architecture that needs maintenance windows.
With the right data foundation, manufacturing leaders like Porsche and Miele continuously improve their production – tested, versioned, zero downtime.

Stefan Schwab, Co-CEO, Cybus

Meeting session 7

15:00 - 15:25

CASE STUDY

Why Lean Comes Before Digital Manufacturing Transformation

Manufacturers often invest in digital technologies expecting rapid gains in productivity, quality, and efficiency, only to find that inconsistent processes, unclear ownership, weak operating discipline, and poor data foundations limit the value those technologies can deliver.

In this session, Richard Gordon shares why his organization chose to strengthen its Lean operating system alongside its digital manufacturing strategy. Drawing on practical experience with Lean management systems, electronic batch records, digital scheduling, data governance, and process standardization, he will show how operational discipline creates the foundation for effective digitization.

The session offers a pragmatic approach for manufacturers seeking to use digital technology to expose problems, improve decision-making, and accelerate continuous improvement rather than simply automate existing dysfunction.

Key Takeaways

• Why digitizing unstable or poorly defined processes often amplifies existing problems rather than solving them.

• The Lean capabilities that should be in place before, or developed alongside, major digital manufacturing investments.

• How standard work, process ownership, governance, and management systems improve the effectiveness of digital tools.

• How digital technologies can strengthen Lean by making abnormalities visible, improving data availability, and accelerating root cause analysis.

• Lessons from implementing electronic batch records, digital scheduling, data governance, and standardized business processes in a regulated manufacturing environment.

• A practical roadmap for building the operational and digital foundations required for sustainable manufacturing transformation.

Richard Gordon, Operational Excellence & Digital Transformation Manager, Sumitomo Biorational Co.

Meeting session 8

15:25 - 15:50

COFFEE AND NETWORKING

15:50 - 16:15

PRESENTATION

Faster Time-To-Market manufacturing mitigating costly slowdowns, rework, and compliance risks

Integrate supply chain into the product lifecycle for improved time-to-market
Monitor conformance, traceability, and model fidelity across your ecosystem.
Feed analytics and AI engines with structured, reliable supplier data.

Frank Popielas, COO, Capvidia

Meeting session 9

16:20 - 16:45

CASE STUDY

Faster Time-To-Market manufacturing mitigating costly slowdowns, rework, and compliance risk.

Integrate supply chain into the product lifecycle for improved time-to-market

Monitor conformance, traceability, and model fidelity across your ecosystem.

Feed analytics and AI engines with structured, reliable supplier data.

JJ Russell, VP of Sales, VSimple

Meeting session 10

16:50 - 17:35

CLOSING PANEL DISCUSSION

Culture or Targets: Hard Choices in Digital Manufacturing Transformation

Every transformation playbook says bring people along, build buy-in, align IT and operations. Yet most initiatives still miss their targets because the standard advice hides trade-offs that leaders resolve very differently. Slow the rollout to win hearts and minds, or hit the date and let adoption catch up? Convert the veteran who resists the new system, or move them out? When safety, quality, delivery, and cost compete for the same change capacity, which bends first? Panelists take opposing positions on these questions and work them through live. Bring your hardest change problem: the close is rapid-fire scenarios, 60 seconds per panelist on what they’d actually do.

Panelists:

Sugato Bose, Senior Director, Enterprise Architecture – Information Technology, Medline

Richard Gordon, Operational Excellence & Digital Transformation Manager, Sumitomo Biorational Company

Colin Cosgrove, CEO & President, Laystrom Manufacturing Company

Nereida Parks, OCA Regional Privacy Officer, Olympus Global

17:35 - 17:40

Chair's Closing Remarks

17:45 - 18:45

DRINKS RECEPTION

DAY TWO – Thursday, 29th October 2026

07:45 - 08:30

REFRESHMENTS AND NETWORKING

08:30 - 08:40

Chair's opening remarks

08:45 - 09:30

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSIONS

Small group discussions tackling your most critical challenges

Working Roundtable topics:

Integrating AI into Legacy Systems
Strategies for Effective Change Management 
Enhancing Supplier Collaboration through Technology 
Implementing Digital Twins for Quality Control 
Cybersecurity Best Practices for Manufacturing 
Optimising Supply Chain Visibility 
Leveraging Data Analytics for Forecasting 
Developing a Roadmap for Digital Transformation 
Sustainable Practices in Manufacturing Operations 
Training, Retaining & Upskilling a Digitally Skilled Workforce

09:35 - 10:00

OPENING KEYNOTE

Digital Reality: An Ongoing Journey

Most digital transformation case studies present a finished story. This isn’t one of them.

Having recently returned as President and CEO of Laystrom Manufacturing — a growing 75-year-old precision sheet metal manufacturer on Chicago’s West Side — Colin Cosgrove shares what digital transformation actually looks like inside a mid-sized manufacturer navigating market uncertainty, a multigenerational workforce, and technologies that range from a legacy document management, to a 6000W fiber laser running lights-out, to AI-assisted quoting deployed in 2026.

From Paperless Parts and advanced CAD/CAM to collaborative robotics and machine monitoring, Laystrom is building continuously and intentionally towards a bright and dynamic future — learning what works, what doesn’t, and what the technology alone can never solve.

Colin explores the intersection of people and processes, honoring the past and planning for the future, and how to see around the corner ahead. A preview of the HERO framework introduced here will carry forward into the day’s closing panel discussion.

Colin Cosgrove, CEO & President, Laystrom Manufacturing Company

Meeting session 11

10:00 - 10:25

COFFEE AND NETWORKING

10:25 - 10:50

CASE STUDY

From factory floor to cloud: Enabling scalable interoperability through OPC UA

Discover how OPC UA enables seamless IT/OT integration and supports scalable digital manufacturing architectures.
Learn how the new OPC UA Cloud Initiative connects factory floor data with major cloud platforms and analytics tools.
Explore real-world use cases showing OPC UA in action for digital twins, predictive maintenance, and edge-to-cloud deployments.
Understand the role of open standards in modernizing legacy systems and unlocking long-term interoperability.

Michael Clark, Director, OPC Foundation

Meeting session 12

10:55 - 11:20

PILOT TO PLANT CASE STUDY

Leading Digital Transformation Beyond the Pilot Phase

This session explores the leadership, governance and organisational changes needed to turn successful pilots into business-wide transformation.

Scaling successful pilots into enterprise-wide transformation.
Building leadership support and cross-functional alignment.
Creating governance that balances innovation with operational stability.
Measuring transformation through business value and operational outcomes.

Meeting session 13

11:25 - 11:50

CONNECTIVITY SESSION

Connectivity is the Nervous System of the Modern Plant

Manufacturing is experiencing its most consequential infrastructure shift since electrification. The question is no longer whether to digitize — it’s whether your network can keep up with the data your operations are already generating.

Today’s smart factory doesn’t fail because of a broken machine. It fails because of a broken connection. Downtime is a network problem before it’s a production problem.

Verizon is actively building the nervous system of the modern plant. Come hear how Verizon partners with manufacturers to address challenges with real-time data collection, advanced automation, and scalable network expansion.

Mike Weller, Director of Global Solutions Manufacturing, Verizon

Meeting session 14

11:55 - 12:20

CASE STUDY

Unifying IT/OT systems with seamless edge data integration for an interoperable IIoT

Best practices for modernising outdated OT to enable secure and resilient IT/OT convergence.
How to ensure the integrity and reliability of data streams from integrated legacy and OT systems for accurate insights and automation?
What proven cybersecurity protocols mitigate escalating risks in interconnected IT/OT environments, considering evolving regulations?
What network segmentation architectures are critical for a disruption-ready factory, safeguarding converged IT/OT systems?

Shashank Sharma, Senior Product Marketing Manager, HiveMQ

Meeting session 15

12:20 - 13:20

LUNCH

13:20 - 13:45

OPEX CASE STUDY

Driving Operational Excellence Through AI and Data

This session explores how one manufacturer is using AI, connected data and digital tools to improve efficiency, quality and plant performance.

Key takeaways:

Identifying the digital initiatives delivering the greatest operational value.
Using data and AI to improve productivity, quality and asset performance.
Lessons learned from implementing digital change across manufacturing operations.
Where the organisation is focusing its next phase of investment.

13:50 - 14:35

CLOSING PANEL

What's Next? The Manufacturing Digital Roadmap for the Next 24 Months

Which technologies will have the biggest impact on manufacturing over the next 24 months?
How can manufacturers build a trusted data foundation for AI and advanced analytics?
What are the biggest barriers to scaling digital transformation—and how can they be overcome?
How can organisations modernise legacy systems without disrupting operations?
What will the most successful manufacturers be doing differently by 2027?

Vijay Krishna, Global VP: Quality & Regulatory Affairs, Glanbia

Michael Clark, Director, OPC Foundation

Kamin Mohoney, Business Transformation Management & Strategic Advisor, SAP

14:35 - 14:45

Chair's Closing Remarks

Manufacturers only permitted to attend as delegates.

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