How can manufacturers ensure the successful delivery of their complex projects under conditions of increasing uncertainty and a lack of required human resources? The solution lies in intelligent project and resource management. Read the article to gain insight into the specifics of manufacturing project management and learn useful recommendations on the effective orchestration of projects in the industry.

Key Takeaways: 

  • Manufacturing project management deals with initiatives aimed at creating physical products. 
  • Manufacturing projects are affected by increased digitalization, resource shortages, sustainability trends, and increasing demand for projects. 
  • Manufacturing projects management helps manufacturers optimize resource and costs, and improve product delivery.
  • Effective manufacturing projects management requires thorough planning and monitoring, robust resource management and capacity planning, flexible project management approaches, and intelligent PM tools.

 

What Is Manufacturing Project Management?

Manufacturing project management involves planning and executing endeavors running in manufacturing environments. The latter deal with creating physical products, which in turn embraces a variety of processes that should be properly managed. These processes also require human and material resources that should be utilized and administered intelligently to make sure products are created on time and within the approved budget.

The goals of manufacturing project management are as follows:

  • Increasing production efficiency, 
  • Reducing operational costs,
  • Improving manufacturing operations,
  • Optimizing resource utilization,
  • Reducing downtime and waste,
  • Improving product quality,
  • Ensuring compliance with industry standards. 

Manufacturing project management example 

As an example, let’s imagine a mid-sized food manufacturer that needs to increase packaging capacity and reduce defects caused by manual work. The company started a project to implement an automated packaging line. 

The project involves selecting a vendor, purchasing necessary equipment, coordinating its installation, integrating it with existing systems, and training people to work with it. All of these are stages of the same project. Speaking about risks, they were resistance to change, technical issues, and delivery delays. The project lasted for 6 months. 

Upon its completion, the company increased packaging throughput, reduced labor costs, and decreased defect rate. 

To understand the specific character of the manufacturing projects, let’s take a look at the industry’s trends and specific manufacturing project challenges that have a direct impact on manufacturing project management.

Increased use of technologies and related risks

Industry 4.0 is no longer a buzzword, it’s become an imperative for manufacturers to remain competitive. This involves the application of advanced technologies (digital twin, Industrial IoT, AI, etc.), which require additional costs, time to get a handle on them, and can be accompanied by risks and uncertainty.

A lack of human resources

It’s hard to mention an industry that isn’t affected by workforce shortage these days. This is mostly explained by the rapidly changing technology landscape and an insufficient number of people capable of dealing with these technologies, the competition for a digital workforce between industries as well as workers’ aging. As a result, a lack of resources has been an ongoing challenge for the manufacturing industry.

Sustainability requirements

Sustainability involves electrification and decarbonization efforts that in turn require investments and can essentially increase the product costs. Also, leveraging innovative technologies is always somewhat risky, as it may require more time to master them and it can be difficult to predict the project outcome.

Increasing demand for products

Following the COVID-19 pandemic’s decrease in demand, the manufacturing industry is currently experiencing its growth. Meeting the increasing demand under conditions of ongoing resource shortage is a challenge for manufacturing project management.

Uncertainty

There are various sources of uncertainty in manufacturing: inflation, ongoing supply chain challenges, geopolitical tensions, changing market demands, and even the latest technology adoption. These uncertainties make it difficult to plan projects and predict their outcomes and may lead to unexpected situations during the production process.

Pressure for quick product delivery

To remain competitive in the market with the increased demand for products, manufacturers should reduce their projects’ lead time and deliver products as quickly as possible. This challenge is complexified by the demand for the high quality of delivered products and a lack of human resources.

Manufacturing trends impact project management in 2026

According to Deloitte, some key trends shaping manufacturing project management in 2026 include: 

  • Integration of smart technologies in manufacturing and operations (adopting latest  technologies, AI, robotics to streamline production and reduce human errors);
  • Striving for supply chain resilience (investing in digital solutions to overcome supply chain volatility and uncertainty);
  • Addressing talent shortages (using innovative workforce planning tools and techniques);

In 2026, manufacturers will continue to experience transformation driven by rapid technology development, evolving customer needs, and global tension. This poses the need for more strategic, flexible, and proactive approaches to project management.

Read more: Top 10 Manufacturing Trends for 2026: What’s New?

Therefore, manufacturers need to deliver more products with a limited number of human resources in a highly uncertain and risky environment. Read the next section to find out how the implementation of project management can help them meet these needs.

Why Manufacturing Companies Need Project Management

The benefits of project management for manufacturing companies are as follows.

Better visibility of the manufacturing processes.

As project management is impossible without regular progress and performance tracking, manufacturers can get regular updates on the state of their projects and utilization of resources. Additionally, this minimizes the chance of deviating from the project schedule, going over the budget, and delaying the delivery of a product. 

Effective risk management.

Risk management being an integral part of project management involves predicting all possible risk-bearing events and planning responses to them. This aims to reduce the chances of their negative consequences on the project flow and product delivery.

More efficient utilization of resources.

Project management goes hand in hand with resource and budget management. Together with regular monitoring of all project-related processes, this makes it possible to timely spot and eliminate bottlenecks and optimize utilization of an organization’s resources.

Optimization of production costs.

Project management allows for detecting and eliminating inefficiencies, managing risks and projects’ timelines, which along with wise resource management helps optimize costs and avoid extra expenditures.

Read more: 8 Tips on Reducing Project Costs

Therefore, the advantages of project management in manufacturing are obvious: it helps optimize the production processes and utilization of available resources; contributes to improved product quality, reduced costs, and delivering products on time and within the project budget. 

Of course, project management isn’t a silver bullet that will improve the manufacturing process on its own. Read the next section to find out the prerequisites for the effective project management process in the manufacturing industry.

Manufacturing Project Management Methodologies 

Manufacturers may use diverse project management methodologies depending on the project type, complexity, and the final outcome. Here are the most common manufacturing project management methodologies. 

Waterfall 

This is a classical project management approach used for projects with linear and sequential structure, rigid processes, and well-defined requirements. In manufacturing, this methodology can be used for projects dealing with, for example, equipment installation or regulatory compliance. 

Stage-gate methodology

Stage-gate (or phase-gate) methodology is one of the most popular approaches in manufacturing project management. It’s also structured and sequential and involves dividing a project into phases (stages) and gates or decision points. It’s used for new product development, technology integration projects, and other initiatives that involve high risks or high costs. 

Lean project management 

This approach was initially developed for manufacturing. With time, it’s evolved into a project management methodology that is aimed at improving processes, eliminating waste, and maximizing value. In manufacturing, it can be used for quality of process improvements projects and other endeavors focused on efficiency, quality, optimization, and improvements. 

Six Sigma (DMAIC) 

This a structured methodology focused on detecting and eliminating defects and their causes and improving project output. It also involves data-driven decision making. Six Sigma consists of several steps: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. In manufacturing, it’s used for quality improvement and defect reduction. 

Agile 

This methodology isn’t native for manufacturing, though it can be adapted to benefit some projects in this industry. It’s a flexible and iterative methodology that welcomes changes and continuous improvement. You can use Agile for new product development projects, prototyping or design projects.

Read more: Engineering Project Management: The Essential Guide

Best Practices for Manufacturing Project Managers

1. Plan projects thoroughly.

Despite that manufacturers deal with numerous uncertainties, proper production planning and scheduling is the backbone of the smooth project flow and achieving desired outcomes. First of all, you should define the project timelines (its duration) and the key project milestones. Note that planning task completion dates is ineffective because some tasks can take more or less time, but it’s much more important to focus on milestones and the project completion date. Secondly, creating a detailed plan will allow you to understand what resources you’ll require for the execution of projects along with corresponding costs.

Plan for uncertainties and risks

Remember that project plans should not be deterministic as if nothing is going to change during the work on a project. As manufacturers deal with risks and uncertainties, project managers should pay the closest attention to risk analysis and create a detailed manufacturing risk management plan with responses for all potential risks. Also, it’s essential to prepare for uncertainties — e.g., include time and capacity buffers in your estimates. In this case, these events won’t ruin the workflow and there will be no risks for delaying the delivery of the product and/or spending extra costs.

Read more: Fighting Uncertainty in Organizations, Including Matrix Ones

2. Apply a flexible approach to project management.

Under conditions of high uncertainty, applying deterministic project management methodology like Waterfall may lead to ruining the project flow. A lot of things may change repeatedly during the project, so the approach to dealing with manufacturing projects should be flexible enough. At the same time, it can be tempting to apply Agile project management with its flexibility, frequent value delivery, quick time to market, and intense interaction with clients. However, focusing solely on Agile has its pitfalls, e.g., a lack of long-term planning is one of the biggest ones. With continuous iterations, it can be impossible to predict when the final version of the product will be completed. So, the best solution will be using a hybrid approach, i.e., combining two or more methodologies and making the most of each of them depending on a project’s needs. By the way, applying hybrid approaches is one of the project management trends.

Read more: 7 Current Trends in Project Management [2025]: What to Prepare for?

3. Plan resources’ capacity in advance.

Under conditions of a limited number of human resources involved in numerous projects, resource capacity planning in manufacturing is the first thing that should be done before starting a project. This will allow project managers to assess a project’s feasibility, identify resource shortages if any, and take measures to fill the gap between resource demand and supply. Otherwise, there’s a high risk of the inability to complete the required orders, miss the project’s due date, and go over the budget. You can use capacity planning software or manufacturing capacity planning tools to make accurate forecasts and staff current and upcoming projects with required resources.

4. Monitor the state of the projects’ health.

As the manufacturing industry is facing the demand for faster product development and delivery, companies should make efforts to eliminate bottlenecks and inefficiencies and keep every project on track. This will ensure smooth project flow and team members’ productivity. For this reason, it’s essential to monitor performance but do this in the right way. As a rule, project and portfolio managers track performance at the project level. But it’s much more important to start from the resource level. Bottlenecks appear on the resource level, and if you monitor only the project progress, you won’t be able to spot the root causes of issues. Instead, monitoring team performance on a regular basis will give you a chance to detect bottlenecks early on and avoid their negative consequences for the project level.

Read more: Tracking Performance: Switching from Project to Resource Level

5. Use the right project management tool.

Implementing the above-mentioned tips will be challenging without the assistance of advanced manufacturing project management tools. They help overcome the complexity of production environments, streamline workflows, optimize resources and processes, and support decision making. We’ll review their capabilities in the section below.

Manufacturing Project Management Software: Epicflow Example

Implementing the above-mentioned tips will be challenging without the assistance of advanced software tools. Let’s explore some capabilities of Epicflow, an AI-powered manufacturing project management solution, as an example of a powerful tool that contributes to the successful orchestration of manufacturing projects.

Effective resource management

Epicflow’s unique approach aims to achieve resources’ efficiency thanks to preventing and eliminating bottlenecks, correct prioritization, and intelligent resource allocation. In addition, the tool allows for material resources’ management. Intelligent management of human and material resources lets manufacturing companies complete more projects with the same resources thanks to their optimization and reorganization of the workflow. In addition, Epicflow helps plan resources’ capacity and in such a way ensures proper staffing of future projects.

Portfolio optimization

Epicflows’ AI-driven portfolio optimizer helps organizations optimize portfolio performance and improve value delivery thanks to value-driven prioritization, capacity planning, and AI-driven decision making. What is more, it can analyze your input and suggest a sequence of projects with the highest potential for value delivery under conditions of resource constraints.

Performance analysis

Epicflow makes it possible to track both resource performance and the progress of projects, which allows you to assess project teams’ efficiency and detect bottlenecks if any. In particular, you can review resource groups’ output in relation to their capacity and see what projects or tasks overload your resources.

Data-driven decision-making

In a highly risky and uncertain environment, it’s essential to make reasonable decisions. Epicflow makes the decision-making process data-driven: its What-if Analysis feature allows you to simulate various scenarios, analyze their impact, and come up with the best possible solution. You can use this feature to test the most effective way to resolve bottlenecks or check how it’s better to respond to risks.

Visibility into the whole project portfolio

Manufacturing projects are often complex and costly, so it’s critically important to stay up to date with the state of the project environment. In Epicflow, you can keep track of all projects in the Pipeline and see their states at a glance as they are marked with corresponding colors.

Therefore, Epicflow perfectly meets the needs of complex project management in manufacturing industry allowing manufacturing companies to optimize their costs, achieve resources’ efficiency, quality control, and competitiveness. Contact our experts to learn more about Epicflow’s capabilities that help organizations achieve their project goals and our own project management principles for the seamless delivery of manufacturing projects.

Conclusions

Manufacturing companies are facing various challenges, from resource shortages to risks related to intensive technology implementation. Under these conditions, project management provides manufacturing organizations with numerous benefits: comprehensive visibility, enhanced monitoring and control, effective resource and budget management, and optimized decision-making. One of the main prerequisites for effective manufacturing project management is the use of manufacturing project management software. It enables manufacturing companies to overcome the complexity of manufacturing projects, manage their resource efficiency, and facilitates achieving desired outcomes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is manufacturing project management?

Manufacturing project management is the use of project management principles and tools to plan, execute, and control projects run by manufacturing organizations. Manufacturing projects can be related to any manufacturing processes, from creating products to implementing improvements in the production process.

What trends affect manufacturing project management?

Manufacturing project management is greatly affected by manufacturing industry trends. For example, resource shortages, increased use of technologies, sustainability requirements, uncertainty, supply chain disruptions, and increased demand for products.

Why is project management important for manufacturing organizations?

Project management helps manufacturers in the following ways:

  • Optimization of costs;
  • Improved resource planning and utilization;
  • Visibility into project-related manufacturing process;
  • Effective risk management;
  • Informed decision-making;
  • Improved communication and collaboration.

How to manage manufacturing projects?

To manage manufacturing projects effectively, first of all, you should create a detailed and flexible project plan and plan resource capacity. Also, it’s important to select an appropriate project management method – it should be well structured but at the same time flexible. Finally, you should monitor both project progress and resource performance regularly.

What software is used for manufacturing?

Manufacturers use a variety of software, e.g., enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution systems, product lifecycle management, computer-aided design and engineering, etc. Also, they use manufacturing project management solutions to streamline project management processes, manage resources, and deliver manufacturing projects successfully.