Why Smart Manufacturing Culture Beats Tech: with Ronnie Darroch – Former EVP from Plexus

When warehouse teams started pulling material off production lines at night to fix inventory variances while production workers were bonused on different metrics, Ronnie Darroch realized something was fundamentally broken about how manufacturers approach manufacturing operations and people.

Plexus' former EVP and CTO shares with Andrew and Jennifer why most smart manufacturing projects fail: leaders focus 80% on connectivity and data, only 20% on building the smart manufacturing culture needed to act on insights in manufacturing operations. His contrarian 80/20 rule flips this approach completely.

Ronnie's four decades leading digital transformation across Seagate, Motorola, Jabil, and Plexus taught him that "getting the data is the easy part," while developing a smart manufacturing culture with management processes for continuous improvement separates successful implementations from expensive failures.

For AI governance, he advocates human accountability over algorithmic decision-making, emphasizing that technology should prove itself innocent rather than being assumed guilty. But someone must always own the outcomes.

In short, Ronnie says, manufacturing remains fundamentally a people business. Discretionary effort from engaged teams creates a competitive advantage that no amount of technology can replicate.