Locals still call it "The Shoe." Built in the early 1900s as the headquarters and manufacturing complex for the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, it was, in its day, one of the most advanced industrial facilities in the world. USMC didn't just make shoes — it made the machines that made shoes, turning a slow, labor-intensive craft into a modern, scalable industry.
Today, that same building — now known as Cummings Center — houses offices, life sciences companies, and software providers like us. The machines are gone. The mission hasn't changed: help manufacturers produce more, waste less, and compete globally.
That's not a coincidence. It's the pattern the Industrial Revolution set in motion — and it's the same pattern playing out right now with AI and robotics.
In its early years, USMC wasn't eliminating shoemakers — it was giving them leverage. A single worker operating a lasting or stitching machine could do what used to take a dozen people by hand, more consistently.
The fear at the time was identical to the fear we hear about AI today: machines will take our jobs, skilled trades will disappear. What actually happened was different. Production exploded, quality went up, and the industry created entirely new categories of skilled work — machinists, engineers, plant managers — that hadn't existed before. Beverly's economy boomed for decades on the strength of that shift.
Manufacturers today are living through the same transition — just with software and sensors instead of belts and pulleys.
None of this replaces the manufacturer. It replaces the bottleneck. Just like USMC's machines didn't eliminate shoemaking as a trade, AI and robotics aren't eliminating manufacturing jobs — they're eliminating the parts of the job that were never the valuable part to begin with.
The companies that adopted new technology early didn't shrink — they grew. USMC became dominant by building mechanization, not resisting it. Manufacturers leaning into AI-driven planning today are positioned the same way.
New technology creates new kinds of skilled work. The machinists who kept USMC's equipment running didn't exist as a job category a generation earlier. Today's equivalent — technicians managing automated lines, analysts interpreting AI forecasts — are the new skilled trades.
Industries get to be reinvented, not discarded. The Shoe wasn't torn down when shoe manufacturing moved on — it became something new, still full of people building things. That's the story for today's manufacturing workforce too, when the transition is managed well.
The lesson from 120 years of manufacturing history isn't that technology is painless — transitions take real investment and thoughtful change management, then and now. But the fear that new technology hollows out manufacturing has been tested before, in this very building, and the result was the opposite: more production, more skilled jobs, a more resilient industry.
AI and robotics are the latest chapter in a story manufacturers have been writing for over a century. The question isn't whether to participate — it's how to do it in a way that strengthens your people along with your output.
An ERP shouldn't be something your team works around. It should be the reason decisions are faster, data is trustworthy, and the floor and the front office are looking at the same numbers. If this checklist raised more questions than it answered, that's the conversation worth having next.
Curious how AI-powered tools are already showing up inside modern manufacturing ERP systems? Read How AI Is Changing Reporting in ERP Systems or see how IIoT and predictive analytics are creating smarter factories today.