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title: Where Does Manufacturing Process Improvement Begin? Insights from IMTS 2026
description: Explore what manufacturers at IMTS 2026 revealed about improving quality, operational efficiency, and decision-making to drive better manufacturing performance.
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# Where Does Manufacturing Process Improvement Begin? Insights from IMTS 2026
Caitlin Pagano | 10/15/2026
Topics: [Manufacturing](https://blog.minitab.com/en/blog/tag/manufacturing)
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**We thought we knew which answer would win, but the finished tower told a different story.**
Going into IMTS, we had a theory. We were asking manufacturers a simple question at the Minitab booth:
**If you could improve one thing in your operation, where would you start?** **Quality? Operations? Or Decisions?**
And if our team had placed bets before the show opened, here’s where they would be putting their money:
But rather than guess, we decided to ask.
# IMTS: Where we started
| On the first day of IMTS, there was nothing particularly impressive sitting on our table. Just a blue baseplate, three containers of bricks and a question. Each color represented one answer: **Quality, Operations or Decisions.** Attendees chose the area they’d most want to improve and added that corresponding colored brick to the Build Better tower. Don’t get us wrong, we had lots of fun with the bricks, but of course, t**he conversations that followed were pivotal.** We asked people why they chose what they did, and that's where things got interesting. |  |
| --- | --- |
# IMTS: Where we ended
| By the end of IMTS, our very empty baseplate looked like this: Blue, black and white are woven through the entire thing. There was no runaway answer like we expected there would be. *Instead, we heard manufacturers talk about quality challenges they wanted to catch sooner. We heard about operational constraints, throughput and opportunities to get more from existing processes. And we heard about the challenge of having plenty of production data without always having the visibility or context needed to decide what to do next.* **Different manufacturers chose different places to start.** And maybe that's the more useful answer... |  |
| --- | --- |
# There isn't one way to Build Better
It's easy to talk about the future of manufacturing as though everyone is heading towards the same destination from the same starting point.
But of course, they're not.
For one operation, building better might mean [detecting process variation](https://www.minitab.com/en-us/solutions/key-capabilities/process-excellence/) before it becomes scrap. For another, it's finding the constraint that's quietly [limiting throughput](https://www.minitab.com/en-us/resources-services/resources/case-studies/fujifilm/). Somewhere else, the data may already exist, but[connecting it well enough](https://www.minitab.com/en-us/products/prolink/) to support a confident decision is the bigger opportunity.
And those challenges don't exist independently.
> **Better visibility can lead to better decisions. Better decisions can improve operations. Better operations can create more consistent quality. Pull on one thread and you often find yourself touching the others.**
That interconnectedness showed up pretty clearly in the tower we built together at IMTS.
## We heard directly from manufacturers about what “better” means
Looking at the finished tower, there was no clear divide between Quality, Operations and Decisions. Which tracks with what we heard throughout the week: manufacturers may start with a different priority, but improving one area often depends on improving another.
We went into IMTS curious about which answer would rise to the top, but instead, the mix reinforced something more useful: **there isn't one starting point for building better.**
[](https://hubs.ly/Q04B7VnC0)
How are you Building Better? Join Cheryl Pammer, Senior Head of Insights and Research at Minitab, as she explores key findings from latest research report.
[](https://blog.minitab.com/hs/cta/wi/redirect?encryptedPayload=AVxigLKofMiXunz2CF9opgB7xSZb9cJ%2FVOtb6mbZ3Wh%2F7rsd8udu6BvH6CvRT5IfeozOJ8JPM9xdj56QdV%2BmLpa2%2FVngZ5gjYeNU1R3Rxc4AdowuzZ2Z90xHPcGAV5Ftf1obJASF0t4vGRzyuUzhx0yAcFMsJtinVlMfjAh9tAn0RKBbca5czybx54IKcx0PhUr3&webInteractiveContentId=224384378488&portalId=3447555&hsLang=en)
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