Pella Corp Scales AI Across 20 Plants With Permanent Cross-functional Teams

The Common Question

Why do most AI pilot programs in manufacturing fail to show measurable ROI?

The Lesson in This Case

Pella Corp runs AI pilots and enterprise scaling simultaneously across its 20 manufacturing locations, using permanent cross-functional teams so proven solutions move across the network without being rebuilt. The company anchors every initiative to concrete operational problems: where workers lose time, where complexity breeds errors, and where better information would improve customer outcomes. Senior leaders should take note that the structural investment driving results here is in people, process ownership, and clean documented data, because a strong model built on fragmented data produces wrong answers faster.

Originally reported by Manufacturing Dive. Read the full story here.