This is Part 5 of a five-part companion feature to the video series “Digital Transformation in Defense and the Model-Based Enterprise,” created by AMT – The Association For Manufacturing Technology and William Sobel, co-owner of Metalogi and chief architect of MTConnect. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus is fated to roll a boulder up a hill eternally, only for it to roll back down every time it nears the top. William Sobel can relate. Sobel, co-owner of Metalogi and chief architect of MTConnect, started working on open standards in 2007. In the fifth and final video, “Communicating Solutions Across Teams,” of the five-part series on “Digital Transformation in Defense and the Model-Based Enterprise,” Sobel says, “I thought that once the technology was available, people would just take it and start doing amazing things. What I found is that manufacturing moves very slowly. It’s very averse to change, and you need to provide real use cases, return on investment, and value to make anything viable within a shop.” Nicole Wolter, president of HM Manufacturing, believes face-to-face communication will solve problems because the technologies are there; it is a matter of agreeing on the software and data sets. Nasir Mannan, principal engineer at The Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology, believes that mass adoption of MBE requires an affordable, packaged solution of software modules that have been validated to work together. “We can show you the power of these solutions. We have the experts who have tested it,” says Mannan. Model-based enabled technologies give you the ability to automate production programming. We have the tech providers willing to back us on validation if you are confused about what the technology can do for you.” On the SME side, Carl Dekker of Met-L-Flo Inc. says that to develop trust, “it may be easiest if we could knowingly go about not a cost-based situation, but a scope-based situation, and see how the organizations interact with each other.” On the prime side, Michael Gwara of Pratt & Whitney, challenges all parties to “drive this forward, not just for the industry, but also for the United States as a whole.” Change needs to happen from the C suite to the shop floor, plus it needs government support to fund a transformation that is in the vital interest of the U.S. manufacturing and defense industries. “We hope by IMTS 2026, we will have fostered communications between the various different parties and made progress on the digital transformation,” says Sobel. Watch the entire video series, Digital Transformation in Defense: Model-Based Enterprise Environment on IMTS+: Part 1: Demystifying Model-Based Enterprise Part 2: Lessons from Small Manufacturers Part 3: Why Clear Use Cases Matter Part 4: Shaping Culture and Managing Costs Part 5: Communicating Solutions Across Teams
Change happens slowly in the manufacturing industry. Moving MBE forward requires trust, funding, and validated solutions.
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