The #MondayMusings Industrial Transformation blog series provides insight and analysis for executives from the previous week’s briefings, events, and publications @LNSResearch.

LNS recently attended the Excelerate 2018 Conference in Dana Point, California hosted by iBASEt, a manufacturing execution system (MES)/ manufacturing operations management (MOM) company focused on aerospace and defense (A&D) and complex discrete industries. Over the past years (2015 and 2017), LNS has witnessed a continued growth in customer and prospect participation at the Excelerate conferences. The most quoted statistic of the event was from Tom Captain, the retired Vice Chairman and former Global A&D Leader at Deloitte - there is now $1.7 Trillion in defense spending worldwide.

LNS recently attended Emerson Global Users Exchange, the user conference by Emerson was held in Texas from October 1-5. One of the consistent messages from the Emerson team is their drive to help clients reach top quartile performance. This year was no different, the message was clear - process industries need to achieve excellence in reliability, safety, production, energy and emissions; and Emerson’ portfolio of software, hardware, and consulting services will help clients achieve that top quartile performance in process operations and capital project execution.

LNS has attended the last four Inforum events (the User Conference for Infor customers), and a consistent theme has emerged. At each event, Infor executives review what they promised at the last event, show how they fulfilled those promises (and in some cases exceeded them), and then announce what they intend to accomplish in the next year. The 2018 event held in Washington DC the last week of September followed the same script.

Asset investment planning (AIP) is an approach and now a category of software applications to assess and prioritize capital investment options ― specifically investing in physical assets used to produce or deliver goods or services. Systems used for asset intensive CapEx planning is an outgrowth of financial planning tools that companies use to direct investment portfolios. The fundamental approach in the financial sector is to assign risk and reward probabilities to each investment option, then create an investment portfolio that can deliver the highest return given the investor's tolerance for risk. The industrial sector can apply this approach to capital investments of physical assets: determine the investment amount, calculate expected return, evaluate the risk that the asset will not achieve the return, and weigh that in context of other risks that the investment is meant to reduce or eliminate.

On Thursday, October 25, LNS Research hosted the webcast, “The Road from Metrics to Analytics for Mid-Sized Manufacturers.” The webcast explored data from the 2018 “Analytics That Matter” survey with a focus on finding metrics used by high-performing companies for financial operations, manufacturing operations, and supply chain management. The webcast also focused on how companies can make a move from metrics to advanced industrial analytics, the best practices for building use cases for analytics, and the importance of an Operational Architecture to support industrial analytics.

In the 18 months since LNS coined Quality 4.0 and provided the definitive frameworks, manufacturers throughout the supply chain, across industries, and of varied company sizes have aggressively pursued Quality 4.0 technology and use cases. Today, 64% of manufacturers are pursuing Digital Transformation, and of these, 23% are pursuing quality improvement use cases. A low hanging fruit, Quality 4.0 is one of the top use cases of Digital Transformation initiatives.

The #MondayMusings Industrial Transformation blog series provides insight and analysis for executives from the previous week’s briefings, events, and publications @LNSResearch.

LNS Research recently attended Pilgrim Fusion 2018, the customer conference for Pilgrim Quality Solutions. Pilgrim Quality Solutions is an enterprise quality management software (EQMS) company that is primarily focused on (but not limited to) the Life Sciences industry .

On Tuesday, October 16, LNS Research hosted the webcast, “Digital Twin: Discrete Manufacturers Making the Connection from Innovation to Performance.” The presentation explained the state of play of Digital Twin in discrete industries, where it’s going in the coming years, and how this exciting mix of real with virtual for products and assets will deliver endless possibilities to improve performance and competitive advantage in discrete manufacturing .

The #MondayMusings Industrial Transformation blog series provides insight and analysis for executives from the previous week’s briefings, events, and publications @LNSResearch.

On July 31, manufacturing ERP vendor Plex Systems announced the acquisition of DATTUS, an Indianapolis-based software company focused on collecting machine data from the factory floor and applying advanced analytics. Terms of the deal were not disclosed .

The goal of a Digital Twin is to have a software copy that behaves as closely as possible to its real-world twin, capturing every single attribute of that physical thing. We are often focused on Digital Twin of a product – because as products evolve their Digital Twin can be updated to reflect the new product, it can also predate the new product. But what about the benefits of having a Digital Twin for assets? Consider a manufacturing plant, we can start with small pieces of equipment that are vital to the production – the more critical that equipment is, the more likely is it that a Digital Twin will deliver benefits. The component, of course, must be significant enough to warrant the (high) cost of developing a Digital Twin or have enough pre-existing models available to construct a first-generation Digital Twin. The key for executives is to understand that Digital Twins can bring immediate benefit to a manufacturing plant (and the products it produces), but they are a long-term play rather than a quick fix.