In manufacturing businesses, volatility is now the standard. From the pandemic to geopolitical unrest, among manufacturers, the past five years have helped cement the idea that disruption is the new normal. Each week, manufacturing businesses in the U.S., U.K., and Germany lose hundreds of millions due to disruptions that cut into productivity, profits, and supply chain strength.
A new, international study by Fluke Corp. revealed that during the past 12 months 68% of U.K. manufacturers, 60% German manufacturers, and 55% of U.S. manufacturers have suffered unplanned downtime. In the U.K., the cost of lost production can exceed £1.8 million per hour. Disruption is a direct threat to profitability.
These are not isolated failures; they are symptoms of an industrial model designed for yesterday’s predictability, not today’s uncertainty.
A web of disruption
Manufacturers no longer face one threat at a time. Instead, risks are stacked on top of each other, often hitting at the same time. Supply chain instability, rising energy costs, regulatory change, environmental disruption, and cyber incidents: each one of these is capable of bringing production to a standstill.
Fluke’s data shows that 19% of manufacturers experience downtime multiple times per day, and 15% report incidents lasting up to 72 hours. Every lost hour carries a financial impact that cascades across the enterprise: lost output, missed orders, rising costs, and declining customer trust.
This new environment of costly, unplanned downtime demands a fundamental reset, one that treats reliability not as maintenance, but as resilience.
The end of business as usual
For decades, reliability was a support function, an insurance policy against failure. But that mindset no longer fits. Downtime erodes competitiveness and drains billions in value from global industry each year. Across the U.S., U.K., and Germany, our survey found that manufacturers are losing an estimated $852 million per week to downtime alone.
The problem is not a lack of investment. Global spending on digital transformation is projected to reach $4 trillion by 2027. The biggest hurdle is fragmentation: Organizations are deploying condition monitoring here, predictive maintenance there, and digital twins elsewhere, but too often in isolation. These disconnected efforts generate plenty of data, but little in the way of resilience.
What is the resilience imperative?
To truly withstand disruption, reliability must be re-engineered into a connected ecosystem, one in which the assets, people, and data operate in continuous flow. At Fluke this is called “connected reliability”: an integrated framework that unites sensing technology, predictive analytics, and maintenance intelligence into a single, shared view of operational health.
In this model, sensors act as the eyes and ears, monitoring vibration, temperature, and performance. Artificial intelligence is the brain, detecting anomalies before they escalate. Maintenance management systems are the hands, translating insights into coordinated action. Together, they form a living system for industrial resilience that is not only capable of surviving disruption – but can learn and adapt from it.
Connected reliability does not eliminate downtime altogether; it transforms how organizations respond to it. It turns reactive firefighting into proactive foresight, so that manufacturers are equipped to anticipate shocks and recover faster than competitors. In doing so, the system shifts reliability from being a defensive cost center to a strategic growth enabler.
From reactive to resilient
The cost of a reactive approach is growing fast. By 2030, downtime costs could triple for organizations that fail to tackle the issue head-on.
Transitioning to predictive or prescriptive maintenance requires more than technology. It demands strong leadership.
Technology may be the catalyst for resilience, but leadership sustains it. Executive sponsorship is the single most important factor in whether reliability transformation succeeds. When leaders embed connected reliability into their broader business strategy – aligning it with goals like customer satisfaction, ESG performance, and competitive differentiation – resilience becomes the backbone to operational success rather than a break-fix afterthought.
Competitive advantage
Manufacturers that move early are already seeing measurable gains. Fluke’s analysis suggests that high-reliability organizations (HRO) that integrate predictive intelligence across every site could add up to 5% profitability by 2028 through improved uptime, efficiency, and energy optimization alone.
Beyond financial performance, the benefits extend to culture and capability. Teams empowered with shared, real-time insights work more safely, make faster decisions, and collaborate more effectively. Reliability becomes more than a department, transforming into a shared discipline that unites operations, engineering, and leadership around one goal: keeping value flowing, no matter the conditions.
How quickly can you add resilience?
Resilience has become the currency of competitiveness. It is now the central test of whether a manufacturer can grow, deliver, and sustain trust under relentless volatility.
The question for leaders is how fast they can do it. The organizations that succeed will be those that see reliability not as a maintenance function, but as a strategic capability: connected, intelligent, and embedded across the enterprise.
