Welcome to Manufacturing Minute!

I'm glad you're here.

Let's get to it.

But first, a sponsored ad for a cool event:

A small group of senior ops leaders is getting inside Owens Corning's R&D center next month.

It'll be a working conversation with people who are actually wrestling with how Industrial AI changes the way teams operate day-to-day.

The room will be COOs, senior manufacturing and supply chain leaders, CEOs... anyone who's growth-constrained by their current operations or actively rethinking their operating model for what's next.

Just hard questions, real talk, and peers who are actually building the future.

If you or someone in your network sits in that seat and is wrestling with decision velocity, complexity, or scaling constraints... this is worth the time.

Register here: https://blog.lnsresearch.com/the-coo-council-meeting-feb-2026

🚨In the News

Here's a headline worth paying attention to.

Corning just signed a multi-year, $6 billion deal with Meta to supply optical fiber, manufactured domestically, with facility expansions in North Carolina.

Look, I know Meta isn't everyone's favorite company. But step back from that for a second.

This is a massive advanced materials manufacturer betting big on U.S. production to support AI infrastructure buildout.

That's real investment. Real jobs. Real supply chain resilience.

The AI boom needs physical stuff, cables, fiber, facilities, power. Someone has to make it.

And increasingly, the answer is: we do.

Worth watching where this trend goes.

🏭 Manufacturing Minute

Here's something that keeps nagging at me.

We spend weeks evaluating features.

Months on ROI models.

Endless meetings debating which platform has the prettier dashboard.

But almost nobody asks: Who owns this company? And what happens when their investors want a return?

I've watched this movie before.

Promising vendor gets VC money.

They grow fast, hire like crazy, make big promises.

Then the investors need their exit.

Suddenly your "partner" is shopping themselves to the highest bidder.

Your roadmap? Gone.

Your relationship with that engineer who actually understood your problems? They left six months ago.

Innovation matters.

Capability matters.

But in this era of rapidly evolving technology, I'm starting to think the ethical foundation of the company behind the software matters more.

Give me employee-owned.

Give me people who are actually committed to doing the right thing for the customer, not just until the next funding round.

It's not sexy.

It won't show up on a feature comparison spreadsheet.

But five years from now, when you're still running that system and need help? That's when ownership structure becomes the only feature that matters.

THE TACTICAL TAKEAWAY: Next vendor eval, add one question to your list: "Who owns you, and what's their timeline?" The answer will tell you more than any demo ever could.

As promised, tactical manufacturing in a minute,

Ryan