Smart Manufacturing Mindset™
Smart Manufacturing Mindset™, presented by CESMII - The Smart Manufacturing Institute & SME, is a monthly webinar where we challenge guests to think differently about manufacturing. We'll explore the nuances that hide in plain sight – behind the acronyms, techno-jargon and misinformation – to get to the truths that hold real value for real people in the industry.
In partnership with the Department of Energy, CESMII was established as a primary advocate and resource for Smart Manufacturing, including networking, education and workforce development, funded research projects and a Smart Manufacturing Innovation Platform to enable your digital transformation.
Smart Manufacturing Mindset™
Smart Manufacturing Mindset™: Why the Smartest Investment in AI Might Be a SM Roadmap Certification
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While vendors promise transformation and headlines declare a revolution, walk into most plants today and the story looks a lot different.
In this episode of the Smart Manufacturing Mindset, Jeff Winter sits down with three people who have seen this gap up close and have been working to close it: Suraj Sriram, Digital Manufacturing Leader at Kimberly-Clark, and Jim Wetzel and Tim Stuart, the architects and instructors behind CESMII's Certified Smart Manufacturing Roadmap Professional program.
Suraj led the deployment of a unified manufacturing platform across 70+ global sites, engaging more than 5,000 users and completing 300+ go-lives. What he found, again and again, was that the barrier was not the AI. It was everything that had to exist before AI could do anything useful: clean data, connected systems, standardized processes, and an organization aligned enough to actually adopt what got built: https://www.cesmii.org/from-pilot-to-platform-scaling-smart-manufacturing-across-a-global-enterprise/
Jim and Tim have seen the same pattern across dozens of manufacturer engagements. As the evangelists and instructors behind the CESMII Smart Manufacturing Roadmap Professional program, they bring the framework side of the conversation: why the CESMII methodology is vendor-neutral and business-first, what manufacturers consistently get wrong when they skip the assessment phase, and what it looks like when an organization finally gets the sequencing right.
Together, the three guests offer something rare: a view of smart manufacturing transformation from both the inside of a global enterprise and from the practitioners who designed the roadmap to navigate it.
If your organization is feeling pressure to move on AI but is not sure whether the foundation is actually ready, this episode gives you a grounded, practitioner-driven answer to where to start.
Interested in building that same internal capability? CESMII's next Roadmap Professional certification cohort opens July 7th: https://www.cesmii.org/event/smart-manufacturing-acceleration-roadmap-professional-certification-course-07-07-2026/
© 2026 CESMII - The Smart Manufacturing Institute, A Program in UCLA, 520 Portola Plaza, MS 5308 – Box 95155, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1557, USA, (888) 720-8096
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