Digital Transformation becomes an essential strategy for organisations in this new digital arena, specifically after the COVID-19 pandemic and its unprecedented effects on the whole world and the manufacturing sector. In this new digital era, consumers became more expert and more engaging in the products using new technologies. At the same time, companies began to adopt digital transformation strategies in their manufacturing processes to become more agile and give the most value to their customers in fierce competition. This paper aims to identify and model the main challenges that face the digital transformation process in the manufacturing industry.. The main challenges were categorized to four main areas: skills, adoption of new technologies, change management practices, and innovation initiatives. By identifying these challenges, in a new and incremental way, manufacturing organisations will be able to adopt digital transformation processes efficiently and effectively in a proper manner. © 2021 The authors and IOS Press.