A Message from Our CEO – Looking Ahead in 2026

Dear Members and Friends of CESMII,

On behalf of the entire CESMII team, we wish you a peaceful, healthy, and prosperous New Year.

As we reflect on the past year and our engagement with many of you, it is clear that 2025 was both uniquely challenging and deeply validating. As many of you know, CESMII was impacted by the Federal Government and UCLA working through issues related to federally funded awards. We’re pleased to share that CESMII’s federal funding was reinstated just before the holiday.

Despite this uncertainty, CESMII remained fully operational and sharply focused on serving our community. In fact, 2025 marked the strongest growth in new members, industry engagement, and Smart Manufacturing adoption in CESMII’s history. We saw unprecedented alignment, urgency, and momentum around Smart Manufacturing as a critical driver of productivity and competitiveness.

Looking ahead to 2026, several high-impact Smart Manufacturing priorities stand out – areas where we believe focused collaboration will deliver meaningful results.

1. Connecting Business Strategy to Smart Manufacturing Strategy

   One of the most pressing needs we hear from manufacturers is support in connecting business objectives and capital investments to a coherent, well-communicated, and fundable digital and Smart Manufacturing strategy.

   Our rapidly growing community of nearly 100 Certified Smart Manufacturing Roadmapping Professionals is now equipped to engage manufacturers of all size – small, medium, and large – to assess current states, develop strategic roadmaps, align communications, and establish sustainable funding models. This work is accelerating the development of data-driven cultures and a true Smart Manufacturing mindset across all industries.
   
   

2. Expanding Education and Workforce Enablement

   To meet the growing demand for practical, accessible Smart Manufacturing education for all stakeholder groups, we anticipate further expanding our Smart Manufacturing training partners, resources and catalog in 2026, with topics including:

   • Manufacturing Data Information Modeling & UNS Foundations (Interest Form)
   • Smart Manufacturing Leadership Skills
   • Smart Manufacturing Foundational Blocks
   • Smart Manufacturing Advanced Data Integration and AI enablement

    

3. Interoperability as a Strategic Imperative

   In 2025, manufacturing data and systems interoperability firmly emerged as a strategic imperative – marking the end of siloed data and stovepipe architectures and enabling scalable data, application, and integration interoperability. This shift is also broadly recognized as foundational to the effective deployment and scaling of AI in manufacturing operations.

   CESMII’s 3 Smart Manufacturing Architecture Imperatives represent a foundational set of requirements that address this demand for interoperability. We are advocating for open, standards-based information modeling (SM Profiles), interoperable platform requirements, and a common API that can drive scalability, reduce complexity, and unlock real-time value from manufacturing data across systems, applications, and the supply chain. You can learn more about these SM Imperatives here: SM Architecture Imperatives Workshop

   We do want to draw your attention to the newest, and arguably most important of these imperatives. CESMII convened an international, open initiative to establish a common, vendor-agnostic API for contextualized manufacturing information. This effort addresses a longstanding challenge faced by manufacturers and application developers alike: the need to build against incompatible, proprietary platform interfaces. Adoption of this API is already underway among several leading manufacturing software and platform providers, with an official launch planned for early 2026.

   We are also excited to share that several of our technology provider partners are actively working toward compliance with CESMII’s Smart Manufacturing Imperatives. As a result, we anticipate the addition of several new compliant Smart Manufacturing Interoperability Platforms (SMIPs) in 2026 – further strengthening the ecosystem. Stay tuned for announcements.
   
   

4. Scaling Smart Manufacturing for Impact
   Through community engagement, CESMII has identified several strategic innovation and investment areas essential to scaling and deploying Smart Manufacturing, including:

   • Replicating Smart Manufacturing solutions across factories within an industry
   • Scaling from unit operations to factory and enterprise levels
   • Extending Smart Manufacturing solutions across the supply chain, including tier suppliers and small and medium-sized manufacturers
   • Scaling and deploying will demonstrate industry integration, implementation, and reusability of existing SM solutions, practices, and infrastructure.

We have restarted work on our RFP to be able to implement these scale and deploy priorities with the CESMII membership.

We are deeply grateful for your continued engagement and partnership with CESMII. We look forward to an exciting year of innovation, growth, and momentum as we work together to strengthen U.S. manufacturing productivity through Smart Manufacturing.

Warm regards,

Happy New Year!

—

Your Smart Manufacturing Team at CESMII – The Smart Manufacturing Institute

About CESMII