Author: Andrew Holmes in: News
IMTS lands in Chicago every two years, and it draws the kind of attendance that makes it easy to assume you’ll figure it out when you get there. This year, over 90,000 visitors are expected across more than 2,000 exhibitors and 1.2 million square feet of exhibit space. That’s not a floor you walk without a plan.
Most attendees do exactly that. They spend two days covering maybe a quarter of what they intended to see, sit through three demos they didn’t need, and come home with a stack of literature they’ll never open. The show was good. Nothing changed.
This post is for the ops leaders and plant managers who want the week to actually produce something. That means doing the real work before September 14, not after you land at O’Hare.
Are you exhibiting at IMTS 2026? Check out this guide for some great tips.
The most common mistake manufacturers make at IMTS is letting the show dictate their agenda. You walk past something interesting, you stop, you spend 45 minutes watching a demo for technology you didn’t come to evaluate.
Before you go, sit down and write out the three to five operational problems that cost you the most this year. Be specific.
Not “we need better visibility.” Write down what that means on a Tuesday afternoon in your plant: a customer calls asking where their order is, your scheduler pulls up three different spreadsheets, none of them agree, and someone has to walk the floor to find the answer. That’s the problem. That’s what you’re trying to solve.
When you have your list, you have your evaluation criteria. Every demo you sit through, every conversation you start, every booth you stop at should tie back to at least one item on that list. If it doesn’t, keep walking.
IMTS draws exhibitors across CNC machining, automation, robotics, additive manufacturing, software, and AI. That’s a wide field, and most of it won’t apply to your situation.
If your core problems are operational, specifically scheduling chaos, inventory inaccuracy, late shipments, rework, or a lack of visibility into what’s happening on the floor, the machine tool hall is not where you’ll find the answer. Those problems live in your software, your data, and the way information moves through your business.
Identify your category before you go:
Most manufacturers need both over a long enough horizon. At IMTS, you won’t have time for both at depth. Pick your priority and own it.
The show floor is a bad place to evaluate software for the first time. You’re tired, you’re on someone else’s turf, and the demo is built to impress, not to answer your specific questions.
Do the evaluation work before you travel. Research the software vendors exhibiting in your category, identify three to five worth a real conversation, and reach out to them now to book time at their booth. Most exhibitors will confirm a meeting slot in advance, and you’ll get a much better conversation than the one you’d have by walking up cold.
When you’re reviewing vendors ahead of the show, pay attention to a few things that don’t always show up in a demo. Ask how many codebases the product runs on. Ask whether there’s one shared data model across all modules, or whether inventory, production, and shipping each live in their own silo. Ask what implementation looks like for a manufacturer your size and whether you’ll get a dedicated team or a series of consultants who hand off between stages. Those questions will tell you more than any feature list.
The show ends on a Friday. The following week, every exhibitor you spoke with will be sending follow-up emails, and your inbox will be full. If you haven’t built a simple capture process, you’ll lose the thread on every conversation worth continuing.
Bring something to record notes after each meaningful interaction: what the product does, what they said about your specific problem, what the next step was, and who you spoke with. A notes app works fine. The point is to capture it before the next conversation starts, not at the end of the day when four demos have blurred together.
Before you leave home, also decide what a good outcome looks like. Not “we’ll see what’s out there.” Decide what you’d need to learn or confirm at the show to feel ready to move a specific decision forward. A clear outcome makes it easier to recognize when you’ve found it, and easier to stop when you have.
OnRamp is a fully integrated ERP solution built inside a real manufacturing operation, Mancor Industries, a Tier 1 automotive fabricator. It covers quoting, scheduling, production, inventory, quality, shipping, and finance in a single natively integrated codebase. No bolt-ons, no modules that behave like separate products, no middleware holding the data together.
If scheduling reliability, inventory accuracy, or shop floor visibility are on your list of problems to solve, we’d like to show you how OnRamp handles them in practice, not in a polished demo built for a trade show booth.
Find us at IMTS 2026 in Chicago, September 14 to 19. Reach out before the show to book time with our team, and come with your real problems. That’s the conversation we’re built for.
For more information about how OnRamp ERP software can add value to your business fill in the contact form below. A member of our support team will contact you within 1 business day to discuss any questions you have.
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Our efforts began as an internal project of Mancor Industries when we identified the need for a more cohesive ERP system to manage the complexity of multiple plants, multiple products, multiple customers and multiple functions.
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