Most industrial transformations fail not because the technology's wrong, but because the organization isn't built to absorb it.
The question worth asking isn't why they fail. It's what the ones that succeed are made of.
Teknor Apex are one of North America's largest custom plastic compounders: 3,000 employees, 16 plants in the United States, two in Asia, two in Europe. They've survived every economic cycle, every wave of offshoring pressure, every raw material shock of the past century.
We've been building with them for close to two years. What they've taught us is more useful than any technology benchmark: a theory of what it actually takes to survive.
Trust before technology
There's a version of the industrial AI story that starts with the technology: the sensors, the algorithms, the dashboards. That version misses the precondition. Michael Roberts, Chief Innovation Officer at Teknor Apex, puts it plainly: "If there's one reason we've been successful, it's been ethics. And if there's one reason we'll get a right to exist in the future, it'll be ethics."
Call it trust: the accumulated result of acting ethically, consistently, over a long enough time horizon that people inside and outside the organization believe you'll keep doing it.
In practice, that trust is what makes change possible. Stephen Covey calls it the speed of trust: organizations with high trust can absorb change faster because people don't need to interrogate every decision. They already know the direction of travel.
At Teknor Apex, that trust capital, built over a century of keeping promises to employees, customers, and suppliers, is what allows them to roll out new software across 3,000 workers in three months. That's what happened with Mercateam: the tool landed, people adopted it, morale went up. Technology can accelerate culture change. But it can't substitute for it.
Sustainability means change
Every Western manufacturer will face a sustainability forcing function in the next decade. The question is not whether to respond, but whether the organization is built to respond fast enough.
There are three levels of sustainability in manufacturing, and most companies are stuck at the first. The first is operational efficiency: optimizing energy use, tightening the production schedule, reducing waste in the plant you already run. Valuable, but not enough by itself.
The second level is product transformation: moving from traditional materials to lower-impact alternatives. This is where complexity multiplies, since every reformulation touches the supply chain. Every new material requires new processing conditions, validated across multiple plants, before a customer can rely on it at scale. It requires a different kind of manufacturing organization; one that can absorb change not as an exceptional event but as a routine operation.
The third level is supply chain accountability: Scope 3 emissions, the carbon embedded in what you buy, and what your customers do with what they buy from you. Managing this requires interconnectedness across partners, plants, and product lines that no manual system can hold.
"Sustainability means change," said Michael. "And the more we embed AI and software into our operations, the lower that barrier to change becomes." That convergence is the point. Sustainability is not a separate agenda from industrial software; it’s the stress test of it. A manufacturer who cannot change a product formulation quickly cannot decarbonize on any timeline that matters. A manufacturer whose operations are built to change can.
Software lowers the cost of change
For most of industrial history, change was the most expensive thing a manufacturer could do. Retooling a line, retraining a workforce, reformulating a product… These things took years and cost fortunes. The manufacturers who survived were not those who changed most, but those who picked their changes carefully and executed them precisely. Stability was the moat.
That logic is inverting. The pressures bearing down on Western manufacturers now are geopolitical, environmental, and technological; they cycle faster than any five-year plan can absorb. The moat is no longer stability. It is adaptability, the capacity to change production systems, materials, and organisations without the change costing more than the improvement is worth.
This is what OSS portfolio companies are built to provide. Not optimization, but operational leverage. When a 2,000-person workforce can be given new performance metrics and tools through a platform deployed in three months rather than three years, the organization can change at the pace its environment demands. Mercateam reached every Teknor Apex facility in the United States in three months. Two thousand operators, shift by shift, plant by plant. Adoption moved fast because operators wanted a tool that made their shifts better, not harder.
"A software-empowered factory is a resilient factory," Michael said. A factory where complexity is managed through software can absorb more change with less disruption. The factory that changes faster than its competitors earns the next hundred years.
Why incentives determine everything
The reason most industrial software deployments fail has little to do with the technology, but it has a lot to do with incentives. A consultant earns the fee whether the software works or not; a vendor earns the licence whether the operator adopts it. Neither has a structural reason to care whether the change sticks.
The OSS model is built on the opposite principle. We take equity in the companies we build. Our industrial partners hold positions in the Renaissance Fund, which reinvests in those companies as they scale. When a startup deployed inside Teknor Apex's plants reaches the next growth threshold, Teknor Apex benefits. The startup isn’t trying to close a contract. It’s trying to build something operators will actually use, because adoption is the condition for its own growth.
The Renaissance Fund closed its first tranche at €44M, against a €75M target, with Teknor Apex, Decathlon, and Établissements Peugeot Frères as anchor LPs. Since 2019, OSS has built 22 companies, deployed across 3,800+ industrial sites, with the portfolio having raised over €100M collectively. The model works because it has to work for everyone, or it doesn’t work at all.
The next 100 years of manufacturing
The question now is whether the factories that exist today can continue to exist for the next generation. And the one after that. And the one after that.
The answer is not obvious. Western manufacturing is under more simultaneous pressure than at any point in the past century: supply chain fragility, labor scarcity, material transition, regulatory tightening. The companies that survive this aren't the ones with the most software. They're the ones that spent decades building the trust to absorb change, and now use software to make that change cheap enough to keep up.
The only way through is to put builders inside the factory, in safety shoes alongside the operators. Teknor Apex has been building trust for a hundred years.
The next part is what we're building together.
If you run a manufacturing organization facing the same pressures (sustainability mandates, material transition, workforce changes...), let's talk.
