Industrial Transformation Blog

The recent announcement by Dassault and ABB of a partnership highlights an Industrial Transformation and digitalization trend – to fill in the gaps of a comprehensive asset lifecycle and value chain solution, especially in the Digital Twin arena by the growing number of partnerships.

Last week LNS attended the annual ABB Customer World held here in Houston. ACW was a successful and well delivered conference with over 10,000 customer attendees from all over the world. The LNS team was part of a larger contingent of media and analysts who were exposed to a technology tour and number of meetings that allowed us to gain a better understanding of ABB’s overall direction, new organization and strategic partnerships.

It was a pleasure to attend the recent Hart Energy 2019 Influential Women in Energy Luncheon in Houston. In its second year, the event had almost 1000 attendees, double that of last year, and honored 25 outstanding women across the energy industry.  The pinnacle award recipient was M. Katherine Banks, Ph.D. currently Vice-Chancellor of Engineering and National Laboratories, and Dean of Engineering at Texas A&M University.

The Digital Twin market is evolving fast – yes, it affects strategies of independent software vendors and automation vendors. But, it also has significant implications for field service providers, engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC), and process licensors. It’s quite surprising to see how many different types of companies could be or are already involved with Digital Twin.

Every year LNS Research puts forth predictions around the key trends in Industrial Transformation. Dan Miklovic’s 2018 forecast focused on the evolution of asset performance management (APM) 4.0 with the shift in messaging to business-driven benefits, the growth of Digital Twins, autonomous device support, and the evolving vendor landscape. In our 2018 Report card, I noted that the Digital Twin is evolving to include the physical and process aspects of the twin. This evolution is happening primarily at two levels, in the design and engineering space, and in the operations space. However, there is still a lack of general industry understanding of what constitutes a Digital Twin.