The last that I wrote about CESMII the output had been several educational initiatives regarding smart manufacturing.
I contacted Jillian Kupchella, marketing director, last month initiating some conversations so that I could get an updated.
For those not familiar with the organization: CESMII – the Smart Manufacturing Institute – has a total current investment commitment of $201M from Department of Energy funding and public/private partnership contributions, with a mandate to create a more competitive manufacturing environment here in the US through advanced sensing, analytics, modeling, control and platforms. CESMII is one of 18 Manufacturing USA institutes on this mission to increase manufacturing productivity, global competitiveness, and reinvestment by increasing energy productivity, improving economic performance and raising workforce capacity. University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) is the program and administrative home of CESMII.
The CEO is a former colleague from MESA, John Dyck.
The early education initiatives have blossomed over the ensuing few years to a community of nearly 100 Certified Smart Manufacturing Roadmapping Professionals who are equipped to engage manufacturers of all size – small, medium, and large – to assess current states, develop strategic roadmaps, align communications, and establish sustainable funding models. This work is accelerating the development of data-driven cultures and a true Smart Manufacturing mindset across all industries.
They identified manufacturing and systems interoperability as a strategic imperative – marking the end of siloed data and stovepipe architectures and enabling scalable data, application, and integration interoperability. I’ve heard and written about the data silo and stovepipe architecture for perhaps decades. I hope they can move that ball forward (to use an American football analogy given the recently completed Super Bowl).
Hearing from Dyck, CESMII have identified a couple new initiatives they consider key to the widespread deployment of Smart Manufacturing.
CESMII’s 3 Smart Manufacturing Architecture Imperatives represent a foundational set of requirements that address this demand for interoperability. We are advocating for open, standards-based information modeling (SM Profiles), interoperable platform requirements, and a common API that can drive scalability, reduce complexity, and unlock real-time value from manufacturing data across systems, applications, and the supply chain. You can learn more about these SM Imperatives here: SM Architecture Imperatives Workshop
We do want to draw your attention to the newest, and arguably most important of these imperatives. CESMII convened an international, open initiative to establish a common, vendor-agnostic API for contextualized manufacturing information. This effort addresses a longstanding challenge faced by manufacturers and application developers alike: the need to build against incompatible, proprietary platform interfaces. Adoption of this API is already underway among several leading manufacturing software and platform providers, with an official launch planned for early 2026.
We are also excited to share that several of our technology provider partners are actively working toward compliance with CESMII’s Smart Manufacturing Imperatives. As a result, we anticipate the addition of several new compliant Smart Manufacturing Interoperability Platforms (SMIPs) in 2026 – further strengthening the ecosystem. Stay tuned for announcements.
Scaling Smart Manufacturing for Impact
Through community engagement, CESMII has identified several strategic innovation and investment areas essential to scaling and deploying Smart Manufacturing, including:
- Replicating Smart Manufacturing solutions across factories within an industry
- Scaling from unit operations to factory and enterprise levels
- Extending Smart Manufacturing solutions across the supply chain, including tier suppliers and small and medium-sized manufacturers
- Scaling and deploying will demonstrate industry integration, implementation, and reusability of existing SM solutions, practices, and infrastructure.
The Institute have given itself some ambitious projects. We wish them success.
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