UMH Delivers 426% ROI According to New Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study
Cologne, May 26, 2026 — United Manufacturing Hub (UMH) hired Forrester Consulting to find out independently what the platform actually returns. Forrester interviewed four of UMH's customers, built a financial model from what those customers actually experienced.
The findings: 426% ROI over three years. Payback in under six months. €4.9 million in net present value for the composite organization.
Forrester spoke with four decision-makers across industrial manufacturing, automotive, and food and beverage , all Germany-based, and aggregated their experiences into a single composite organization: a global manufacturer with roughly €3 billion in annual revenue, rolling out UMH across 5 sites in Year 1, 10 in Year 2, and 15 in Year 3. Every figure is risk-adjusted and discounted at 10% annually to produce conservative estimates.
Key Findings
The three-year, risk-adjusted quantified benefits for the composite organization include:
- €3 million from reduced unplanned downtime. The composite experiences 400 hours of unplanned downtime per site per year, at €50,000 per hour. UMH reduced unplanned downtime by 14%. When a problem is visible before it escalates, teams can stop it before the line stops.
- €1.5 million from eliminating manual data collection. Sites ran 52 machine inspections per site per year - 10 hours each, two employees per inspection - and manual meter readings consuming four days per month, totaling 384 labor hours per site annually. UMH automated both.
- €1.5 million from lower energy costs. Once sites could see consumption continuously, they found waste quickly. One customer caught a cleaning and heating routine running on weekends when production was idle. Another found machines left on that hadn't been used in months.
Forrester also identified four additional benefits that showed up in the interviews and brings long-term advantages:
- AI readiness. AI in production requires clean, standardized, contextualized data. UMH builds that foundation. Every customer described it as a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have.
- No vendor lock-in. UMH's open-source stack lets customers integrate new tools, switch components, and change direction without asking for permission or paying for the privilege.
- Deployment partnership. UMH works closely with customers during deployment on data modeling, network segmentation, and architectural decisions - surfacing issues they hadn't thought about yet.
- Operational autonomy. Operators and team leads could check machine behavior, downtime events, and shift performance on their own. Training took as little as 30 minutes. Daily meetings got faster because the data was already there when people walked in.
"It could happen that nobody [would notice] for three days that we had a problem. The system was running, just not smoothly. But now I see it black on white on the monitor. There is a problem, and I can react virtually just in time."
- IT service owner, Food and beverage
"Before, employees would go on foot with a sheet of paper to the meter locations and write the values down, and that's how they measured energy consumption. Now, the data is simply written into the database and can be evaluated and seen over time."
- Head of IT, Industrial manufacturing
About the Study
A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of UMH, May 2026. Consulting team: Antonie Bassi. Forrester interviewed four decision-makers across industrial manufacturing, automotive, and food and beverage sectors, all headquartered in Germany, and constructed a composite organization based on their experiences. All figures reflect three-year, risk-adjusted present values at a 10% annual discount rate. Results apply to the composite organization described in the study and will vary based on individual organization size, infrastructure, and deployment scope. This study is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.
The full study is available at https://www.umh.app/forrester-total-economic-impact-tei-study
About UMH
United Manufacturing Hub (UMH) is an open-source platform for industrial data management. UMH connects the shopfloor with IT systems, structures data within a unified namespace, and enables manufacturers to quickly build scalable digital and AI applications. The Cologne-based company is backed by international investors and serves customers in both the process and discrete manufacturing industries, including companies such as Böllhoff and HiPP.
More information at www.umh.app
Media Contact: Niklas Hebborn, Chief Commercial Officer & Managing Director
