Why Digital Transformations Fail: The Role of Change Champions in Food Manufacturing

Key takeaways:

• Most digital initiatives don’t stumble on technology — they stumble on adoption. In manufacturing, “change management” ranks as the #1 workforce‑related obstacle to smart manufacturing progress.
• Winners operationalize change through people. Manufacturers that scale digital successfully build capabilities to overcome “pilot purgatory,” with Global Lighthouse Network organizations showing outsized resilience and performance by institutionalizing new ways of working.
• Change champions turn strategy into plant‑floor behavior. A trained, empowered champion network accelerates adoption, sustains usage, and converts use into business outcomes.
• Make it measurable. Tie champion activities to leading indicators (adoption, usage, proficiency) and lagging impact (OEE, yield, downtime). The highest‑performing programs combine this with a disciplined pilot‑to‑production pattern already familiar to food manufacturers.

Digital programs falter on people and scaling

Across more than 1,500 manufacturers globally, change management is cited as the top workforce obstacle to smart manufacturing progress in 2024. That signals a people and process problem more than a tooling problem. 

US manufacturing leaders echo this: Deloitte’s 2025 Smart Manufacturing Survey finds the biggest headwinds to value realization include leadership buy‑in, resource constraints, and — critically — change management and adoption. Yet, when companies get it right, they report 10 to 20% gains in production output and 7 to 20% improvements in workforce productivity from smart‑manufacturing initiatives. 

Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum’s Global Lighthouse Network shows that organizations that build scaling capabilities (not just pilots) sustain performance and even weather shocks — 85% reported minimal to no revenue loss through the pandemic due to how they embedded new digital ways of working.

Bottom line: The constraint isn’t the tech. It’s how we mobilize people to adopt, use, and improve it at scale.

What a “change champion” is (and what it isn’t)

A change champion is an influential, front‑line leader or operator who:

• Translates digital strategy into local workflows, SOPs, and shift‑level behaviors
• Surfaces risks and removes friction between IT/OT, quality, maintenance, and production
• Coaches peers, models the new behaviors, and feeds continuous‑improvement data back into the program
• Owns adoption, usage, and proficiency measures — not just attendance at training

Champions are not part‑time cheerleaders or “voluntold” super‑users. They are a structured network with training, time allocation, explicit responsibilities, and direct access to sponsors.

A proven operating model: The champion network

A practical operating model starts with clear governance: 

• An executive sponsor — often the VP of operations or manufacturing — communicates the “why,” sets priorities, and removes systemic barriers. 
• An enterprise program lead owns the roadmap, value tracking, and the templates that will be replicated across sites. 
• At the plant level, site champions — ideally one per value stream or for every 25 to 40 impacted users — own on‑shift adoption, maintain the feedback loop, and steer standard operating procedure (SOP) updates. 
• A quality and safety liaison ensures digital changes align with HACCP, sanitation, and food safety requirements.
• An information/operational technology (IT/OT) liaison secures data integrity, integrations, cybersecurity, and system reliability.

Deloitte’s 2025 data shows the most successful manufacturers form dedicated internal teams to manage change — a signal to formalize these roles rather than treating them as afterthoughts. 

During rollout, champions should have 10 to 20% of their full-time equivalent (FTE) reserved for coaching, floor walks, and issue resolution. Once the solution stabilizes, the commitment can taper to 5 to 10% for sustainment. Recognizing wins publicly and connecting champion outcomes to performance goals signal that leadership values the work and expects it to endure.

Finally, cadence keeps the network aligned: 

• A weekly site stand‑up (about 30 minutes) reviews adoption metrics and removes blockers in real time. 
• A monthly value review (about 60 minutes) examines trends in adoption, usage, proficiency, and impact; confirms realized business value; and locks changes into SOPs and training. 
• A quarterly cross‑site sync distributes playbooks, dashboards, and troubleshooting tips so other lines and facilities can replicate success. 

Together, these elements turn a handful of enthusiastic individuals into a coordinated capability for scaling digital change across food manufacturing operations.

Selecting the right champions

A champion should be someone others trust, someone who will help them understand why change is necessary and what their role is in moving things forward. 

Choose individuals who:

• Have peer credibility (informal influence on the line)
• Are curious problem solvers who already close gaps between departments
• Communicate clearly across shifts and roles
• Are comfortable with data and digital tools and can teach others
• Model safety and quality first — non‑negotiables in food operations

Red flags include chronic over‑allocation, solely IT‑centric profiles with limited plant context, or roles that cannot flex to cover coaching time during ramp‑up.

Make it measurable: The champion scorecard

Track both behavior and business.

Leading indicators (weekly):

• Adoption: Percentage of impacted users logging in/using the tool each shift
• Usage depth: Number of critical transactions per line (e.g., checks, scans, changeover steps)
• Proficiency: Right‑first‑time digital actions; retraining needs

Lagging indicators (monthly):

• OEE, unplanned downtime, first‑pass yield/FPY, giveaway, rework, complaint rate, changeover time, energy and water per unit

Organizations that persist through these change hurdles report double‑digit improvements in output and capacity. Change champions make those gains repeatable across lines and sites. 

Four failure patterns — and how change champions neutralize them

1. Pilot purgatory: When projects stall at the trial stage, change champions can help organizations break through by insisting on clear graduation criteria — such as sustained usage above 85% and measurable impact — before expansion. 
2. Tools equal transformation: Too often, new technology is installed but standard operating procedures and roles remain unchanged. In these cases, champions play a vital role by co-authoring updated SOPs, ensuring new skills are integrated into training, and securing sign-off from quality teams so that processes reflect both compliance and innovation.
3. Invisible value: When benefits aren’t measured or reported, finance leaders remain unconvinced, and momentum fades. Champions guard against this by instrumenting projects from the outset. They track and report on leading and lagging indicators.
4. Leadership gaps: When sponsors aren’t active, systemic blockers remain in place, and frontline teams lose confidence. Champions counter this by maintaining structured escalation paths to visible, engaged sponsors. By bringing unresolved issues forward weekly until they are removed, champions keep leadership accountable and ensure digital adoption is more than a one-off announcement.

What this looks like in food manufacturing

• Process control and quality: Champions ensure operators complete required digital checks (temperatures, weights, allergen verifications) inside the MES/QMS — driving right‑first‑time and auditability.
• Sanitation and CIP: Champions standardize digital CIP procedures and dashboards, cutting cycle time variance while protecting food safety.
• Maintenance: Champions coach planners and mechanics on predictive‑maintenance alerts, turning insights into scheduled work that reduces unplanned downtime.
• Utilities and sustainability: Champions align production and utilities teams around live dashboards (steam, water, kWh per unit), reinforcing behaviors that reduce waste.
  

A practical path forward (action plan)

1. Name an executive sponsor and empower a program lead to build the network.
2. Select site champions using the checklist above; reserve 10 to 20% of their time for 12 weeks.
3. Choose one use case per site and define graduation criteria.
4. Instrument and baseline adoption, usage, proficiency, and impact, as well as business metrics.
5. Stand up the cadence (weekly stand‑ups, monthly value reviews).
6. Publish wins and package a replication kit for the next line.

FAQ for food manufacturing leaders

How many champions do we need per facility?
Start with one champion per value stream (or per 25 to 40 impacted users), plus a quality/EHS liaison during rollouts. Scale down once usage stabilizes.

Where should champions report?
Operationally to the site leader, functionally to the program lead. Keep them close to the work and the roadmap.

How do we prioritize use cases?
Pick one high‑frequency workflow (e.g., changeovers, line clearance, or digital checks) and one high‑pain workflow (e.g., downtime triage). Prove adoption and impact before broadening.

What’s the risk of not resourcing champions?
Industry data point to stalled programs and unrealized value. In Rockwell’s global survey, change management tops workforce obstacles, while Deloitte reports adoption and value realization as persistent headwinds. Resourcing champions directly addresses both. 

Digital transformation in food manufacturing doesn’t fail because the technology is lacking — it fails when people aren’t equipped or empowered to change.

By investing in a structured network of change champions, manufacturers can bridge the gap between strategy and daily operations, ensuring that new tools are adopted, mastered, and translated into measurable results. Champions turn pilots into programs, programs into performance, and performance into a lasting competitive edge.