On December 11, Dassault Systèmes (3DS) announced the acquisition of mid-size manufacturing ERP vendor IQMS for $425 million. While this seems like a high price, the fit for 3DS is strong, and it will considerably extend the offerings 3DS can make to their midsize discrete manufacturing clients.

Ideally, compliance is part of your strategy, but not your entire strategy.  It's not enough to produce a safe product, that works as intended, and meets regulatory requirements.  Today’s quality leadership must contribute to the firm’s reputation, competitive standing, profitability, and growth.  Adding to the burden, your company’s industry, target market, role in the supply chain, size, and so many other factors intensify the pressure.  Yes, it’s a complex web of codes, guidelines, standards, and practices that companies face:

Research analysts from LNS attended the Plex Systems Analyst Day in early November at the company’s headquarters in Troy, Michigan. In an unusual move, Plex hosted its Customer Advisory Board (CAB) concurrently, giving customers and analysts a chance to interact directly. This level of direct access is rare among software vendors and demonstrates a strong show of confidence by the Plex executive team. The Plex CAB includes representatives from companies in automotive, metal forming, food and beverage (F&B), aerospace and defense (A&D), and other discrete and batch manufacturing industries.

LNS Research attended the Rockwell Automation Fair in Philadelphia, PA on November 14 and 15, 2018. Rockwell Automation® (NYSE: ROK) is an industrial automation and information company with $6.7 Billion in sales and 23,000 employees. This was the 27th annual Rockwell Automation Fair hosted to demonstrate their products and those of their ecosystem partners. Rockwell Automation noted there were over 8,000 customers at the event making it the largest Rockwell Automation Fair ever held outside of Chicago. They also hosted “Automation Perspectives” for the media and analysts on November 13.

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 AVEVA World Summit 2018 in La Quinta, California. Over 300 business executives from 33 countries participated in the event themed around “Your Digital Transformation: A Strategic Roadmap.” The event was a key opportunity for the company to position the “new” AVEVA given the recent merger with the Schneider Electric Software business. The company also had to highlight the Digital Transformation journeys of several of its customers.

In mid-2017, LNS Research identified that an early but significant group of manufacturers had begun to recognize Quality 4.0 as one of their top Industrial Transformation initiatives. LNS coined the term Quality 4.0 and defined the space - why to adopt Quality 4.0, and how to build a successful strategy. Over time, the interest in Quality 4.0 has continued to accelerate, and many manufacturers are now either investigating Quality 4.0 or deploying early pilots .

On Thursday, November 15, LNS Research hosted the webcast, “Driving Performance in Life Sciences: Making Industrial Transformation Real with Quality 4.0 Technology.” The presentation explored how life sciences manufacturers can build a successful Quality 4.0 project to drive Industrial Transformation and gain competitive advantage.

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.