What Is a Center of Excellence in Manufacturing and Why Is It Important?

DELMIA’s Back to Basics blog series is your go-to resource for foundational insights into manufacturing, operations, and supply chain management. Designed for both newcomers and those seeking a refresher, this series delves into core topics and addresses key industry questions.

Seventy-four percent of manufacturing COOs say their company has a global production system. Only 29% say it’s fully implemented across all sites. That 45-point gap, measured in a McKinsey survey of more than 100 operations leaders, is where a lot of productivity, quality, and capacity leak out of global manufacturing networks.

Consider a scenario most operations leaders will recognize: one plant cuts changeover times by 22%. The improvement is real, repeatable, documented. Six months later, the other plants in the network are still running the old process. The knowledge exists. It just doesn’t travel. A Center of Excellence (COE) exists to close that gap.

What is a Manufacturing Center of Excellence (CoE) and How Does It Work?

A Center of Excellence in manufacturing is a dedicated, cross-functional team responsible for identifying, validating, and deploying best practices across a production network. The COE governs the processes that plants run. Think of it as the operational equivalent of a standards body, except the standards it sets are executable. They’re workflows, inspection protocols, quality procedures, and work instructions deployed directly to the shop floor.

A well-built COE consists of subject matter experts spanning process engineering, quality, IT, and plant operations. They evaluate how work gets done at each site, identify the best-known method for each operation, and package it into a standardized template. The COE then owns the governance model: deciding what changes get made, how they get tested, and when they get pushed to the broader network.

The word “excellence” carries specific weight here. Organizations like MESA International (the Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association) have spent decades building frameworks around the idea that manufacturing operations should pursue continuous, measurable improvement and then spread those gains systematically. A COE is the organizational structure that makes that happen.

Why Are Manufacturers Investing in Centers of Excellence to Scale Operations and Close Skills Gaps?

The workforce math is brutal. According to Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, the U.S. manufacturing industry could need as many as 3.8 million new workers between 2024 and 2033, with up to 1.9 million at risk of going unfilled. That knowledge won’t replace itself. When experienced operators retire, their process expertise walks out the door with them, and the tribal knowledge that kept a line running well disappears overnight. A COE captures that expertise in documented, replicable form before it’s gone. Standardized processes mean standardized training, which translates directly into faster time-to-competency for every new hire. New operators learn the validated method, follow the approved template, and reach productive output faster because they aren’t reinventing the process from scratch.

Technology investment is surging. Scaling it is the bottleneck. The Deloitte 2026 Manufacturing Industry Outlook shows that 80% of 600 manufacturing executives plan to invest 20% or more of their improvement budgets in smart manufacturing initiatives. Rockwell Automation’s 2025 State of Smart Manufacturing Report, surveying more than 1,500 manufacturers across 17 countries, found that 95% have invested in or plan to invest in AI and machine learning within five years. But that investment only pays off when new capabilities get deployed consistently across the entire network. Pilot programs at a single plant don’t move the needle at scale. A COE provides the governance structure to roll technology adoption out uniformly, which is exactly why 48% of manufacturers in the Rockwell study plan to repurpose or hire additional workers specifically to support smart manufacturing rollouts.

The spending trend points in the same direction. The IMARC Group values the global Manufacturing Operations Management software market at $13.7 billion in 2025, projecting it to reach $26.9 billion by 2034 at a CAGR of 7.82%. Meanwhile, the smart manufacturing market overall exceeded $410 billion in 2025 and is projected to surpass $1 trillion by 2033, according to Grand View Research. Manufacturers are putting real money behind the platform infrastructure that COEs require.

What Are the Core Functions of an Enterprise Manufacturing Center of Excellence?

A manufacturing COE performs five core functions.

Process discovery and validation. COE teams visit plants, measure performance against baselines, and evaluate local improvements. Good ideas get tested. Proven ones get added to the library of approved best practices.

Template creation and standardization. Validated improvements get packaged into process templates: executable digital definitions that include work instructions, quality checkpoints, inspection plans, and the parameters that produced the results. The template is the operational standard. That’s where scale starts.

Global deployment and governance. The COE pushes approved templates to every relevant site and monitors adoption. Without a digital platform capable of distributing process definitions across dozens of facilities simultaneously, this stays manual and slow.

Continuous improvement coordination. The COE collects performance data from all facilities, identifies where the standard is exceeding expectations or falling short, and feeds insights back into the next iteration. The cycle never stops.

Compliance and audit readiness. A single, version-controlled repository of approved processes makes audit preparation dramatically simpler. Regulators and customers can see exactly what process each facility runs, when it was last updated, and what approvals were required.

How Does a MOM Platform Power COE Governance and Global Process Standardization?

A COE without the right technology infrastructure is a committee that generates reports nobody reads. In conversations with manufacturing leaders, the practical question keeps coming back to this: how do you get a validated process template onto the shop floor of 30, 60, or 100+ plants without taking systems offline or waiting months for deployments?

This is where Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) platforms become the operational backbone. MOM goes beyond traditional Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) by unifying production, quality, warehousing, maintenance, and workforce management into a single connected platform. As Mike Bradford, Director of Strategic Business Development for DELMIA at Dassault Systèmes, has written, the optimal MOM solution functions as a platform for manufacturing excellence, helping establish a Center of Excellence to drive process improvement, configuration, distribution, and governance, resulting in greater standardization with less effort.

Bradford frames the MOM market as a continuum, and where a platform sits on it decides whether a COE can do its job. On one end are off-the-shelf solutions. They install fast and cost less up front, but they force a manufacturer to run the vendor’s business processes. That trades away the competitive advantage that lives on the shop floor, where a plant’s intellectual property actually sits. On the other end are pure toolkits. They give you total flexibility and no standards, which becomes its own problem. Twenty plants building their own way produce 200 different solutions from 200 different people. A COE cannot govern that. The platform that makes a COE work sits in the middle: configurable enough to capture a manufacturer’s own methods, standardized enough to push one validated process to every site.

DELMIA Apriso puts that principle into practice. Its Center of Excellence capability enables standardization on an enterprise MES that can be rolled out to all plants, monitored, and updated from a centralized system. The Global Process Manager handles roughly 85% of process commonality and 15% of plant-specific uniqueness across all sites, giving the COE the ability to deploy a validated process template to every facility rapidly while preserving the local flexibility each plant legitimately requires.

The mechanism underneath that is Process Builder. Bradford describes it as a library of more than 1,500 prebuilt business components a COE team assembles by configuration, not code. Need to track genealogy across a build? The component already carries the data elements the process requires, so the team connects sources instead of writing them from scratch. Building from nothing means figuring out every field you need and where it comes from. Starting from a component means you point it at the right data and move on. About 97% to 98% of customers never touch the underlying code. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Configuration changes parameters and process flows. Customization changes code and the database, and Bradford watched it trap a generation of SAP ME users who spent millions tailoring an off-the-shelf product, then had to walk away from all of it when the vendor moved on. A COE configures so it never lands in that corner.

Governance also depends on being able to take a change back. Everything a COE pushes through Process Builder is revision-controlled. Release a template to the floor, hear that it does not hold up, and the team rolls back to the prior version. That is what turns a COE from a body that issues edicts into one that can iterate at shop-floor speed without breaking the plants it governs.

Configuration is the other half of the equation. Low-code business process management means the platform adapts to your operations through parameter settings and process configuration rather than custom code. That prevents the technical debt that turns today’s solution into tomorrow’s legacy problem. It also means the COE team can own more of the process changes and push them to the field faster, while IT and OT keep the governance and security controls in place.

Connecting that platform to the machines is the part that used to break budgets. Bradford explains the old model as client-server: rigid, hardwired adapters, one built for each machine and each protocol, where a single adapter ran from $50,000 to $60,000 and complex ones reached a quarter million dollars. DELMIA Apriso now works through a unified namespace and a data broker built on MQTT and Kafka, a publish-subscribe architecture. He compares it to phone cords. The first iPhone took one cord, sold only by Apple. Today you buy any of thousands. Publish-subscribe works the same way. Change a manufacturing strategy and the connections follow quickly, at a fraction of the cost, because the openness is built into the architecture instead of soldered into each link. It also feeds AI cleanly, since models pull from the same shared data stream.

How Aciturri and Cummins Reduced Changeover and Project Delivery Times

Aciturri, a Tier 1 aerospace supplier headquartered in Spain, manufactures complex aerostructures for programs including the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787. With a workforce of 2,800 employees expected to double before the end of the decade, Aciturri standardized its planning and operational processes through DELMIA on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. The company can now create virtual twins of its production facilities, validate processes digitally before deploying them, and provide customers with capacity estimates that carry a 95% confidence level. The results: “Thanks to DELMIA, we can make better, faster and more accurate decisions. As a result, we have been able to reduce the typical time it takes to deliver a project to one year.”

Aciturri cut delivery timelines from two years to one. That’s what happens when process standardization is an ongoing governance function backed by the right platform. The ability to simulate production capacity with 95% confidence doesn’t come from ad hoc spreadsheets. It comes from standardized data, standardized processes, and a digital infrastructure that connects planning to execution across every facility.

Bradford offers a second proof of what standardization buys you, from Cummins. On an engine line, every station runs a PLC, and every PLC carries the ladder logic that tells its robots how to machine a given engine. When the product changed, a team walked the line and reprogrammed each one. A major changeover ran one to two weeks of downtime. Cummins moved roughly 78% of that decision logic up into Apriso, where the platform chooses the right program for the part coming down the line and you maintain the logic once instead of at every machine. Changeover time dropped from one to two weeks to four to eight hours. That is close to a 90% reduction, and it is the COE pattern in miniature: validate the method once, hold it centrally, and let every station inherit it.

The same discipline is why a COE absorbs acquired plants faster, which matters as private equity and a generational wave of owner exits drive consolidation across mid-market manufacturing. Bradford points to the practical trick: standardize the memory map, the definition of which machine tag produces which piece of data, before you bring a new plant online. Different sites still run different equipment and different communication protocols, so some configuration is unavoidable. The logic does not change. New plants pre-adjust their maps to match the standard, and the team skips remapping every data point for every facility. The MES becomes the process roadmap a buyer follows to fold a new site into one common operation.

How to Build a Sustainable Manufacturing Center of Excellence

If your organization doesn’t have a formal Center of Excellence, the gap between your best plant and your worst is almost certainly wider than you think.

Start with governance. The COE’s authority to define, approve, and enforce process standards has to come from executive sponsorship. Without that mandate, the COE has no teeth.

Build the team with cross-functional depth: process engineers, quality specialists, IT professionals who can scope changes, and plant-level representatives who can validate that standards hold up on the floor.

Invest in a platform that matches the COE’s mission. Your MOM platform should support executable business process management, global process distribution, release-level tracking, and local configuration without custom code.

Measure deployment speed. How long does it take for a validated improvement to reach every site? That single metric tells you whether your COE is functioning as a governance engine or generating documentation nobody uses.

Why a Center of Excellence Is Critical for Competing in Smart Manufacturing

A Center of Excellence in manufacturing turns isolated plant-level improvements into enterprise-wide operational standards. It’s the mechanism that keeps a validated changeover improvement from staying trapped in one plant. With 41% of manufacturers already using AI and automation to close skills gaps, according to the Rockwell Automation study, and Deloitte projecting that nearly half of 3.8 million needed workers may never arrive, building this capability is a competitive requirement. The manufacturers that build COEs now will operate with structural advantages in speed, quality, and cost that their competitors can’t replicate by hiring alone. To learn more about how DELMIA Manufacturing Operations Management supports Centers of Excellence and global process standardization, contact us here.

DELMIA, from Dassault Systèmes, enables manufacturers to keep factory operations running smoothly. Powered by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, our Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) solutions establish a unified digital environment that provides real-time visibility and AI-enhanced control. By connecting the virtual and real worlds, we enable you to streamline complex processes, minimize waste and guarantee quality. Harnessing data-driven insights and intelligent automation allows for optimized production, enhanced adaptability to disruptions and the delivery of sustainable, customer-focused manufacturing performance at scale.