By Cecile Vercellino, Senior Vice President, Industrial Digital Transformation Services, Schneider Electric
New research from the Capgemini Research Institute shows that nearly three-quarters of large European and US organisations now have a reindustrialisation strategy in place or under development up from 59% just two years ago.
On the surface, it reads as an encouraging sign of industrial intent. But leading the Schneider Electric Advisory Services division I can tell you that from helping manufacturers actually deliver transformation rather than just plan it, I find myself focused on a different number in the same report.
At the same moment strategic ambition is rising, planned investment outside highly strategic sectors like semiconductors and defence is falling.
Companies are recalibrating toward more selective, capital-efficient models. Disruption from geopolitical volatility, tariff uncertainty, and tighter financing conditions means manufacturers are being asked to do more with less.
That changes everything about what transformation requires.
Strategy is not the problem. Execution is.
The Capgemini findings describe a more mature, disciplined phase of reindustrialisation one defined by resilience and control-first thinking rather than pure expansion. That is realistic and necessary. But it also means the quality of execution matters more than ever.
Companies cannot afford to spend three years in pilot cycles. They cannot afford programmes that work in one facility and stall everywhere else. And they cannot afford to treat technology deployment as transformation when the hard organisational work hasn’t happened alongside it.
The data that should concern every industrial leader: only around 30% of manufacturers successfully realise value from digital transformation at scale. The other 70% are stuck caught in what I call “pilot purgatory,” where something works in one plant and cannot be replicated across a network with different systems, different cultures, and different starting points.
Why transformation stalls, the three barriers we see everywhere
After supporting more than a thousand industrial sites through transformation programmes, we see the same failure patterns repeat.
The first is scalability. A pilot succeeds. It shows results. And then it stalls, because the conditions that made it work dedicated resource, a receptive local team, a simplified scope cannot be reproduced at scale. What works in plant one breaks in plant seven, because the underlying architecture and methodology were never designed to replicate.
The second is data. Up to 80% of industrial data across Europe goes unused not because companies don’t collect it, but because it sits in silos, fragmented across machines and systems that were never designed to communicate. Without coherent data architecture, the intelligence that should be driving operational decisions simply isn’t reaching the people who need it.
The third and most underestimated is people. Technology is not the hard part of transformation. People are. Programmes designed around platforms and tools, without equal investment in change management and workforce capability, consistently fail to deliver. You can deploy the best industrial AI available. If your operators haven’t been brought on the journey, you’ve built something nobody uses.
Europe’s brownfield sites are not a liability. They are the opportunity.
There is a narrative in industrial circles that Europe’s legacy manufacturing base is its weakness that decades-old factories running on ageing systems are a drag on competitiveness that greenfield investment elsewhere will eventually overtake. I want to challenge that directly.
The vast majority of European manufacturing capacity that will exist in 2035 already exists today. These are not stranded assets waiting to be written off. They are sites with deep process knowledge, embedded engineering expertise, skilled workforces, and established customer relationships built over generations. That is not nothing. That is the foundation of European industrial strength and it is precisely what competitors trying to build from scratch in new geographies cannot replicate quickly.
The traditional efficiency levers that built that strength lean manufacturing, process optimisation, incremental capital investment are no longer sufficient on their own to sustain it. The competitive gap being opened by faster-moving industrial economies is real. But the answer is not to abandon what Europe has built. It is to unlock it.
And here is what has genuinely changed: the tools to do that now exist at a maturity and accessibility they simply didn’t five years ago. Industrial automation, IIoT connectivity, AI-driven analytics, and digital twin technology have converged to a point where they can be applied to brownfield sites without requiring a greenfield rebuild.
Legacy systems can be connected without replacement. Ageing assets can be made intelligent without being scrapped. The deep process knowledge sitting in the heads of experienced engineers can be captured, codified, and made available across an operation in ways that were not practically possible before.
The impact when this is done well goes well beyond operational efficiency. Digitising an ageing site does not just improve throughput or reduce costs it lowers energy consumption, cuts material waste, reduces emissions, and creates better, more skilled roles for the people working there.
Le Vaudreuil, our own 50-year-old factory in France, reduced power consumption by 36%, cut CO₂ emissions by over 80%, and achieved a 64% reduction in water use all while improving delivery lead times by 70% and generating a two-year return on digital investment. That factory did not need to be replaced. It needed to be transformed.
Europe’s brownfield sites are not the problem to be solved. Treated correctly, with the right methodology and the right partners, they are the competitive advantage waiting to be activated. Competitiveness is no longer defined by ambition or by the quality of the assets you start with. It is defined by the speed and discipline with which you execute transformation on what you already have.
What structured execution actually looks like
When Schneider Electric’s advisory practice was built, it grew directly from what we had already done ourselves. We operate 164 factories and 85 distribution centres globally. Nine of our sites including Le Vaudreuil in France, a factory more than 50 years old have been recognised by the World Economic Forum as Lighthouse Factories. We didn’t transform those sites with greenfield budgets. We did it with the same constraints our customers face: legacy infrastructure, ageing systems, and workforces that needed to be carried through the change.
That operational experience is the foundation of our Industrial Digital Transformation Services practice: over four thousand consultants, six practice areas spanning operational excellence, asset management, industrial data and AI, OT infrastructure and cybersecurity, energy efficiency —and critically, change management. A consistent methodology applied across every engagement: Diagnose. Define. Design. Deliver. Scale.
The outcomes, when this is done with discipline, are repeatable. At Nexans, the global cable manufacturer, a structured programme delivered an 80% reduction in maintenance time and 15% energy cost savings, scaled across approximately 35 sites. At Roca, the ceramics group, a unified deployment saved more than 4,400 hours of manual work annually and delivered measurable gains in both efficiency and sustainability performance.
These are not exceptional results. They are what end-to-end execution consistently delivers when it is built on the right foundations.
The question Europe needs to answer
The Capgemini data confirms that the strategic shift has happened. The ambition is there. In a more capital-constrained, execution-pressured environment, that ambition now has to convert into results at scale, across real brownfield infrastructure, with real workforces.
Europe’s industrial competitiveness in this decade will not be defined by how many organisations have a reindustrialisation strategy. It will be defined by how many can actually deliver on it.
That is the gap advisory services exist to close. And right now, it is the most consequential industrial challenge on the continent.
Author biography:
Cecile Vercellino is Senior Vice President of Industrial Digital Transformation Services at Schneider Electric, leading the company’s global advisory practice supporting manufacturers through end-to-end industrial transformation
