Over a quarter of EU SMEs run at very low digital intensity. In small manufacturing it shows

Do you run a manufacturing company with anywhere from a few dozen to two hundred people? There is a fair chance this text describes your plant too. I write about it because the numbers in recent reports show a pattern that rarely gets discussed out loud.

Numbers worth knowing

Eurostat measures the digital intensity of companies across the EU. In the latest reading, 27% of SMEs sit in the very low band, and in manufacturing the figure is 28%. The Digital Decade target is for more than 90% of SMEs to reach at least a basic level of digital intensity by 2030. The current figure is 73%, so the gap is 17 percentage points with four years left.

Below the index the picture gets more concrete. Across the EU, 41% of companies with 10 to 49 employees run an ERP system, which means roughly six in ten do not. In manufacturing as a whole the share with ERP is 58%, while business intelligence tools reach only 17% of manufacturers. The information exists in these companies. It simply lives in separate files rather than in one system.

What the spreadsheet jungle looks like from the inside

Orders arrive by email and land in a spreadsheet kept by sales. The production plan is a second spreadsheet, kept by the shift manager. Stock levels are a third one, updated “when there is a moment”. Works orders go to the shop floor on paper. And the most important thing, the status of a particular order, sits in the head of one person who has just gone on holiday.

Each of these parts works on its own. The problem is that they do not talk to each other. The same information gets retyped three or four times, and every retype is an opportunity for an error. To answer a simple question such as “what did we make on that order”, the owner has to call a small meeting.

Why this costs more in a recovery than in a slump

The HCOB eurozone manufacturing PMI stood at 51.9 in July 2026, with the output index at its highest since March 2022. The dividing line is 50: above it the sector grows, below it contracts. S&P Global notes that part of the expansion comes from precautionary stockbuilding rather than fresh demand.

That is exactly what makes the moment tricky. When orders are plentiful, the mess in the data stays invisible, because utilisation covers it. A company that grows without knowing which order earns and which one merely keeps people busy scales its losses along with its revenue. And that calculation cannot be done while the data sits in four spreadsheets and a notebook on the shop floor.

No IT department is a barrier you can work around

Skilled IT people are scarce, and a company with a few dozen employees usually has no IT department and no intention of building one.

That is perfectly fine. To get out of the spreadsheet jungle, a company of 20-250 people needs one place where the order, the works order, the stock and the invoice are the same piece of information, entered once. No IT department, and no two-year ERP rollout after which half the functions lie unused.

Those are exactly the applications I build: tailored to the process that already runs in the company. The system adapts to the plant, and on the client side it comes down to simply using it.

Where to start

With three questions, before you look at any system at all:

1. Which piece of information is retyped by hand more than once?
2. Which money question (margin on an order, cost of a stoppage) can I not answer within five minutes today?
3. What happens when the person who “keeps it all in their head” leaves or falls ill?

The answers are already your list of digitalisation priorities. Usually it turns out that not everything has to be digitalised at once. It is enough to start with the process that hurts most and grow the system at the pace of the company.

If you want to see how this could look in your plant, write to me. I always start the first conversation with an analysis of the process.

Sources: Eurostat, digital intensity index of enterprises, Eurostat, ERP and BI use in enterprises 2025, State of the Digital Decade 2026, HCOB Eurozone Manufacturing PMI, July 2026.