Industry 5.0 is ultimately encouraging manufacturers to think beyond isolated automation projects and instead focus on building resilience across the full operating system — from suppliers and warehouses to logistics and production environments.
How Industry 5.0 is Changing what Manufacturers expect from IoT on the Factory Floor
Q&A with Ilan Gluck, EVP and Head of GTM, North America | Digital Matter
Tell us about yourself and your role with Digital Matter
I’m Ilan Gluck, Head of Go-To-Market for North America at Digital Matter, where I work closely with customers and partners across the IoT ecosystem to help organizations gain visibility into the assets and operations that drive their businesses forward. What I find most rewarding about this work is the breadth of it; every industry brings a different perspective on operational efficiency, and the impact that follows when organizations gain access to accurate real-time asset data is consistently significant, regardless of sector.
What continues to excite me about the IoT space is the pace at which the physical world is becoming truly legible – where asset activity translates into actionable intelligence that changes how organizations make decisions at scale. At Digital Matter, we build deploy-once, integration-ready hardware engineered to deliver reliable asset intelligence across complex and highly distributed operating environments, giving organizations the visibility foundation they need to grow with confidence and perform over the long term.
Industry 5.0 emphasizes people, outcomes, and resilience. How is this reshaping how manufacturers think about technology across operations and supply chains?
What’s changing is the maturity of what manufacturers expect from technology. The conversation is moving away from “more data, more connectivity” and toward outcomes that genuinely improve operational performance – especially for the people responsible for keeping production moving.
In practice, that often means enabling what we call the 10x Supply Chain Leader: someone who doesn’t need constant noise or dashboards full of unnecessary alerts, but clear, trusted insights they can act on confidently.
Visibility alone has become table stakes. What manufacturers truly care about is whether operational data can actually drive action — improving uptime, inventory flow, throughput, and responsiveness across the supply chain.
That’s also changing how organizations think about scale. In many environments, success isn’t about generating endless streams of data every minute. A handful of dependable updates per day can often provide the operational clarity teams need while still keeping deployments scalable and economically viable.
Industry 5.0 is ultimately encouraging manufacturers to think beyond isolated automation projects and instead focus on building resilience across the full operating system — from suppliers and warehouses to logistics and production environments. The objective isn’t technology for its own sake; it’s creating reliable real-world context that helps people respond faster, plan better, and keep operations moving under changing conditions.
Manufacturers generate vast amounts of data, yet disruptions still persist. What determines whether operational data actually supports decision-making in practice?
The test is simple: does the data help reduce downtime and improve operational decision-making? Those are the KPIs that really matter.
Data only becomes valuable when it answers the questions leaders are actively making decisions around: Do we have the components we need arriving on time? Are assets where they’re supposed to be? Can we trust what our systems are telling us about what’s happening across the physical supply chain?
That’s where reliability becomes critical. The most effective deployments create what’s essentially a trusted “ground truth” layer – a dependable source of operational intelligence that reflects what’s actually happening with assets in motion, not just what systems assume should be happening.
That distinction is becoming even more important as manufacturers invest more heavily in AI and advanced operational analytics. AI systems are only as effective as the quality and uniqueness of the data feeding them. If every company is relying on the same historical datasets or third-party information sources, they often end up arriving at similar conclusions. The organizations gaining a real competitive advantage are the ones generating proprietary operational intelligence directly from their own environments in real time.
That’s where IoT becomes strategically important. It’s no longer just about visibility; it’s about continuously generating accurate operational context that organizations can use to make faster, more informed, and more differentiated decisions.
Where do gaps in visibility around supporting assets most often create friction in manufacturing operations?
A lot of friction comes from supporting assets that organizations depend on operationally but don’t always manage proactively until something goes wrong; assets like returnable transport packaging, racks, pallets, containers, and other mobile carriers moving throughout the supply chain.
These are often foundational to production continuity, yet many organizations still approach them as passive support resources instead of continuously monitored components of the operational ecosystem.
Problems start to surface when those assets aren’t where they’re expected, arrive too late, or show up in compromised condition due to excessive shock, environmental exposure, or general handling wear. Small visibility gaps can quickly escalate into production delays, inventory imbalances, or quality concerns.
And in many industries, these aren’t low-priority assets. Some of the biggest visibility challenges exist in high-value manufacturing environments like aerospace, automotive, and heavy industrial operations, where understanding both asset location and condition is essential to maintaining operational continuity.
As monitoring extends into warehouses and logistics, why do fundamentals like power, device design, and connectivity matter so much to reliability?
Because at the end of the day, supply chain leaders aren’t investing in IoT for the sake of deploying technology; they’re investing in whether they can build a visibility layer they can trust operationally over the long term.
Warehouse and logistics environments are inherently demanding. Devices are expected to perform through inconsistent connectivity, rough handling, long deployment cycles, and limited maintenance opportunities, often across highly distributed operations. In those conditions, fundamentals like battery longevity, rugged device design, firmware stability, and dependable connectivity become essential to maintaining reliable data flow at scale.
Consistency is what ultimately determines whether a deployment creates lasting operational value. Once devices stop reporting reliably, confidence in the visibility layer starts to deteriorate quickly. Teams begin questioning the accuracy of the data, manual processes re-emerge, and the value of the system starts to erode.
As deployments scale, maintenance burdens compound rapidly as well. Frequent battery replacements, hardware failures, inconsistent reporting, or stranded devices all introduce friction that organizations eventually absorb elsewhere across the business.
That’s why reliability extends far beyond the hardware itself. The long-term success of any visibility initiative depends on whether organizations can maintain a trusted, scalable operational intelligence layer that teams are confident relying on every day.
Looking ahead, how can Industry 5.0 principles be applied across the full operating system, from suppliers to logistics, to improve resilience without adding complexity?
From our perspective, it really comes down to balancing standardization with flexibility.
Using globally recognized connectivity standards like 3GPP cellular technologies and Bluetooth Low Energy helps create the interoperability needed to scale across suppliers, logistics networks, warehouses, and international operations more efficiently. We’re also seeing industries begin defining more standardized approaches to supply chain visibility, which reflects growing maturity across the space.
At the same time, resilience doesn’t come from forcing every operation into the exact same framework. Different industries, asset types, and workflows all have different operational realities, so organizations need enough flexibility to tailor solutions appropriately while still maintaining common visibility foundations.
Equally important is ensuring the operational intelligence generated by these systems actually becomes embedded into day-to-day decision-making. In many large-scale deployments, the technology itself performs well — the bigger challenge is often change management: helping teams adapt workflows, trust the insights being generated, and consistently act on them operationally.
That’s where Industry 5.0 becomes as much about people and process as technology itself.
The organizations seeing the greatest success are the ones building visibility across the entire operating system in a way that feels practical and sustainable for the people running it every day. When visibility becomes dependable, scalable, and unobtrusive, organizations can respond faster, plan with greater confidence, and build resilience without creating additional complexity.
The content & opinions in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of ManufacturingTomorrow
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