[he11ow]

You're looking at it the wrong way. What you have is not a liability, but an advantage.

You're building your manufacturing domain expertise. Were you to go and become a data scientist today, odds are you'll find yourself in some form of consultancy trying to sell companies on "AI solutions" without actually having any idea what really matters to insiders. As you have witnessed first hand, many companies prefer building their in-house solutions. Yours does it with Netsuite, some do it with macros and excel...what matters far more than the stack is an understanding of what problems they're trying to solve.

The experience you're getting right now, engaging with stakeholders, seeing their pain points (Why is this report needed? Why do they want to measure that?), building a product for them, selling them onto using the tools you've built...that's worth a lot.

What you want to be doing is definitely not sifting through intro jobs for data science, but using your new knowledge to think up better solutions. Not necessarily implement them in-house - depends what the appetite for this is. But start building your professional persona as someone who knows *both* manufacturing and data science.

Write articles, build in public, post useful insights on LinkedIn, connect with people at the intersection of manufacturing and data. Do that for the couple of years till you finish your math studies, and you'll see the right jobs come chasing after you...