The growth of the Global Lighthouse Network (GLN)—from 16 sites in 2018 to nearly 200 today, across 33 countries and 35 subsectors—underscores the progress leaders have made on the original challenge the GLN identified: integrating advanced technologies at scale to realize significant economic and financial benefits.
The latest Lighthouses, awarded in October 2024 and January 2025, follow the same core principles identified when the network began. Their leaders recognize that what transforms a business is not just a particular technology, or even a unique set of use cases, but the ability of people and processes to use technology to create value across the enterprise.
Accordingly, our analysis finds that Lighthouses resist the temptation to buy into every new technology trend; instead, they invest roughly four times as much in process and people enablers as they do in new technology. For every $2 they spend on tech innovation, Lighthouses earmark $3 for process debt reduction and $5 for scale and adoption. By contrast, we find that most other manufacturers spend closer to one or two times their tech investment on these same enablers.
A closer examination reveals that Lighthouses embrace four approaches to implementing and sustaining impact at scale:
- preventing process debt
- investing in people, process, and technology capabilities
- “assetizing” for scale, meaning deploying structures and tools to scale solutions quickly
- taking a localized approach to solution adoption by the local frontline talent
This article will explore each of these approaches and what they mean in practical terms, presenting real examples from the 2024 Lighthouse cohorts.
Preventing process debt
By now, any chief information officer (CIO) is likely familiar with the concept of technical debt, which accumulates when many disjointed solutions are deployed over time, compounding the eventual costs to fix and integrate them.
In today’s tech-enabled world, the analogous concept for the COO is “process debt,” which accumulates when a company keeps deploying new technologies without making corresponding changes to the processes the tech is supposed to improve—or, ideally, eliminate. Process debt therefore refers to the “tax” a company pays in the form of inefficiencies that eat into the value-adding potential of new technologies.
By contrast, Lighthouses invest to streamline interactions between people and material flows. They do this not only by integrating tools that present trustworthy information and recommendations but also by redesigning the processes around those tools to capture total value. For example, a Lighthouse will ensure that the data generated by newly deployed sensors goes to the employees who are best positioned to act on it.
Designing data flows to enable people and material
Managing data has therefore become especially critical. Based on information from the applications prospective Lighthouses have submitted, we estimate that the volume of ingested and stored data increases by two to three orders of magnitude during digital transformation. Keeping it organized and streamlined is further complicated by the increasing number of tech vendors fueling an exponential rise in the nodes composing a factory’s data value stream.
Lighthouses counter data proliferation by collaborating with suppliers to build common data platforms to handle entire classes of data, such as for internal logistics or for certain types of components. This sort of approach redesigns processes not only to solve the needs of today but also to handle the technologies of tomorrow. Restructured flows allow for frequent upgrades and integrations, making growth less costly and difficult. Lighthouses do not deploy advanced digital tools in a system burdened with waste. Instead, they ensure the digital tools they deploy leverage data that mirrors the physical systems it is collected from.
Investing in capabilities
AI tools are becoming increasingly commodified. This has enabled Lighthouses to develop solutions in-house 37 percent more often than they did from 2019 to 2020—primarily in roles related to AI architecture, design, and integration (Exhibit 1). As a result, while third parties continue to provide services, Lighthouses increasingly opt to own more of their information value chain and outsource only specific elements of tech stack and solution development.
For many other use cases, Lighthouses take strategic, combination approaches to deployment, prioritizing opportunities that augment local capabilities through “extended thinking partnerships.” These involve deep collaboration among in-house teams and external partners, with clear agreements that delineate intellectual property ownership of jointly developed technology.
Digitally driven—but not just by technologists
Lighthouses are dispelling the notion that technology alone drives digital transformation. Instead, they make digital transformation everyone’s job—embedding the technology and people capabilities needed to deliver reimagined processes. On average, this translates into 25 new transformation roles hired per 1,000 factory full-time equivalents, of which nearly half are business and operations roles (Exhibit 2).
In early development, Lighthouses typically establish centers of excellence (COEs) to design and deploy practical, innovative solutions across the network. Some focus on technologies, such as manufacturing-execution systems or digital twins, while others focus on specific process steps, such as prototyping. These COEs often partner with enterprise teams and third-party providers to fill capability gaps, but over time the COEs render themselves obsolete by upskilling frontline site operations and technology leaders, who take on the responsibility of deploying and scaling up these new technologies in localized contexts.
Site leaders are now taking back the responsibility of identifying and integrating advanced technology solutions. A new focus has therefore emerged on upskilling frontline roles to anticipate how future technology could change production processes. As advanced capabilities are democratized (such as via low-code/no-code platforms), employees without coding knowledge can become citizen developers who create, modify, and optimize applications.
Assetizing for scale
Assetization is a systematic approach to developing, managing, and deploying reusable assets for scalable digital transformations across an organization.
Those piloting new use cases without playbooks had to learn by trial and error. But today, many applications have matured. Nearly every new Lighthouse in 2024 has a solution for production scheduling, predictive maintenance, or facilities management in their top five solutions presented in site evaluations. The breakthrough from Lighthouses is the speed and scale of deployment for these solutions; the innovation is assetization—a practice long utilized by the software industry. Assetization in production settings consists of “composable,” universally accessible standard manuals, procedures, and tools that enable frontline workers to harness the power of digital solutions without specialized knowledge.
Deploying composable assets
Composability is a design principle that emphasizes the ability to assemble and reassemble components, allowing for more agile systems. By focusing on composability, Lighthouses develop flexible and scalable infrastructure that adapts to changing business needs, enabling faster innovation, reduced time to market, and incremental improvements rather than large, disruptive rollouts.
Lighthouses tread a fine line. They see every operation as unique, requiring assets and tools that are flexible enough to adjust in local contexts. Yet they also recognize that these same assets must be sturdy enough to scale up with the same underlying foundations over time. The solution is to design assets with composable elements, such as cloud-based and containerized microservices, application programming interfaces (APIs), and data models capable of communicating across diverse systems and processes.
Empowering the workforce with low-code/no-code tools
For the latest Lighthouses, low-code and no-code platforms have become ubiquitous: 76 percent of the 2024 cohort has deployed some version of the technology. Even as models get more sophisticated, pain points continue to be hyperlocal. Individual machines often require unique optimizations that are only understood by on-site operators or technicians. Low-code/no-code platforms enable the front line to make direct adjustments, leveraging their intimate knowledge of equipment and processes.
Tools such as these also empower the nondeveloper community, ensuring scalability across the network. And as technologies become more sophisticated, Lighthouses understand that a solution is only truly composable if it is easy to do the composing.
Localizing adoption with the front line
Adoption remains the elusive factor in a digital transformation. Lighthouses have realized that sustaining a transformation’s impact requires a human-centric approach to design, deployment, and change management rather than a one-size-fits-all mentality. They design systems and interfaces that augment human strengths and use technology that supports people’s abilities rather than supplants them. They invest in their workforces and work environments to foster environments where more improvement ideas come from the front line than from management. They involve operators holistically in the design and development of new solutions.
Designing human-centric processes
Lighthouses are transforming the look and feel of frontline work through human-centric process redesign that rebalances the typical mix of tasks to emphasize technical and reasoning skills—while automating away the tougher, non-value-added, or more dangerous work. They design out hazards and other workplace barriers, such as physical access limitations or specialized licensing requirements, for more inclusive work environments.
Similarly, because frontline operators serve as touchpoints to production, they should be armed with user-friendly decision-making and troubleshooting tools. Lighthouses know that what matters most is not the model or the algorithm but rather how effectively the intended user will interact with it. That means designing intuitive interfaces that people will engage with in their daily tasks and flows in which operators play an active role in problem-solving and issue resolution.
Investing in the workforce
Since 2020, Lighthouses have dedicated an average of 10 percent of their use case portfolio to workforce priorities, including worker experience, skill development, safety, skill augmentation, and work augmentation (such as using technology to connect remote experts to the shop floor). These Lighthouses have achieved an average 10 to 20 percent reduction in non-value-added tasks and 25 to 30 percent improvement in labor productivity.
What also sets Lighthouses apart is their holistic approach to frontline work: More than 75 percent of Lighthouses deploy solutions that span all dimensions of the frontline experience (Exhibit 3).
Building adoption programs to make digital stick
Digital solutions aren’t just for the workforce; they are with the workforce. The most advanced sites source more ideas for continuous improvement from their front line than from the rest of the company—but only when they intentionally invest in upskilling and engaging operators, who can make or break the speed of transformation.
Since every workforce is different, Lighthouses do not take a cookie-cutter approach to digital adoption. Instead, they give sites just enough structure to ensure local requirements are met and resources are sufficiently allocated to drive sustainable change but maintain flexibility and autonomy to personalize and customize at the site level.
Cultivating change agents is critical, as they function as conduits between the front line and management in both directions. From leadership to the front line, they deliver key messages, address questions, and support the education of frontline peers. Conversely, they relay frontline ideas, feedback, and sentiment to transformation leadership—shaping the transformation approach to fit local contexts. For Lighthouses, these change agents participate in and support technology demos, deliver incentives and awards, lead ideation sessions, or speak in town halls. They are the glue that makes change stick.
Closely tied to user adoption is model adoption. It is not enough for solutions to work once—they must demonstrate ongoing value to operators; otherwise, they will be discarded and become more waste.
The third and final article in this series will discuss how, when applying AI, looking beyond production gains can yield greater agility, sustainability, and long-term productivity for the entire organization.
This article is an excerpt from Global Lighthouse Network: The Mindset Shifts Driving Impact and Scale in Digital Transformation, published by the World Economic Forum on January 14, 2025.
The Global Lighthouse Network is a World Economic Forum initiative. The initiative was cofounded with McKinsey & Company and is counseled by an advisory board of industry leaders who are working together to shape the future of global manufacturing. The advisory board includes Foxconn Industrial Internet, Johnson & Johnson, Koç Holding, McKinsey & Company, Schneider Electric, and Siemens. Sites and value chains that join the network are designated by an independent panel of experts.
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