Last month, we published our 2025 Manufacturing Digital Transformation Report based on interviews with manufacturing professionals across diverse sectors. The report identified three universal challenges holding manufacturers back: the data paradox, integration hell, and the AI adoption gap.
But there was one finding that deserves deeper exploration, a challenge so pervasive and so fundamental that it underlies all the others: legacy systems.
Interviewees described operations still running on manual processes, Excel spreadsheets, and decades-old technology. This wasn’t just small manufacturers struggling to keep up. Fortune 500 companies with billion-dollar revenues admitted being “very antiquated” in their operations.
This reality creates a dilemma for operations leaders: you know you need to modernize, but your existing systems, however outdated, are keeping the business running. The risk of disrupting production often outweighs the promise of digital transformation.
The good news? You don’t have to choose between maintaining what works and moving forward. At Unstoppable Software, we specialize in application support and maintenance that keeps your legacy systems stable while creating a path toward modernization.
This post dives deeper into what we learned about legacy systems in manufacturing: why they persist, what they’re costing you, and how to move forward without betting the company on a complete overhaul.
Legacy Systems: The Analog Reality Behind the Digital Rhetoric
Despite Industry 4.0 rhetoric, most manufacturing remains remarkably manual and reliant on antiquated systems, even at Fortune 500 companies.
The Big Company Surprise:
A Fortune 500 building materials company operations leader made a stunning admission: their organization is “very antiquated in going up to more modern software and technologies.” They noted how heavily-manual the bulk of their plants’ operations are.
If a global corporation with massive resources is “very antiquated,” what does that say about mid-sized manufacturers?
The Excel Epidemic:
Multiple interviewees described Excel as the de facto manufacturing operating system:
- An environmental equipment company: “We just use basic Excel things… all our sizing programs are Excel”
- A manufacturing improvement initiative: Attempted to eliminate spreadsheets four years ago but still have “50%” remaining
- A CPA consultant: Noted clients struggle because “users aren’t that Excel savvy” to manipulate the data they extract
One discussion included a semi-serious suggestion to “uninstall Excel from every computer,” highlighting how deeply embedded spreadsheet culture is.
The Historical Data Problem:
An equipment manufacturer explained: “We’ve only started doing 3D modeling in the past four or five years.” This means decades of engineering knowledge exists only in 2D drawings, inhibiting the access to modern AI tools that could help optimize designs.
They “just use old drawings a lot of times” because searching digital archives is more cumbersome than pulling paper files.
Why Legacy Persists:
A manufacturing consultant explained that ERP implementations fail when companies “don’t want a lot of [modifications]… because they see the cost, they get sticker shock.”
So they implement baseline systems that don’t match their processes, forcing workers to create manual workarounds. Over time, these workarounds become the actual process, and the ERP becomes an expensive record-keeping system rather than an operational tool.
The “It Works” Defense:
When processes are manual but functional, there’s no burning need to justify change. As one consultant noted, companies only invest “when the pain is bad enough.”
Manual processes rarely fail catastrophically, they just slowly erode competitiveness through:
- Higher labor costs per unit
- Slower response to customer requests
- Inability to scale without proportional headcount increases
- Loss of institutional knowledge when key people leave
- Quality inconsistency depending on who’s working that shift
The Path Forward:
If this describes your operation, you’re not alone. The key is identifying which manual processes create the most risk or constraint:
Single points of failure: Processes that only one person knows how to do
Bottlenecks: Manual steps that limit throughput
Quality risks: Processes where human error creates defects or compliance issues
Data blind spots: Critical decisions made without real-time information
Start with the highest-risk, highest-impact manual process. Digitizing one critical workflow and proving ROI creates momentum for broader transformation.
