Industrial Transformation Blog

LNS Research was delighted to be invited again to Dassault Systèmes’ (3DS) annual get together for a small band of diverse industry analysts that cover a wide range of 3DS’ industries and technologies. Quite literally right out of the gate, 3DS surprised us on the bus to the event by announcing that Dassault Systèmes had acquired Medidata Solutions, Inc. for $5.8 billion.

LNS Research recently attended HPE Discover 2019 event in Las Vegas, hosted by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The company had $30.88 billion in revenue in 2018, and is focused on Edge, hybrid cloud, and intelligent data. The conference was a well-executed event with well over 9,000 attendees and 8% growth over last year. The highlights were demonstrations and presentations on cool use cases in exciting topic areas:

On Thursday, June 27, LNS Research hosted the webcast, “Enabling Transformation in Life Sciences: Delivering Near- and Long-Term Success with Quality 4.0.” The presentation examined strategies for life sciences organizations to reduce IX program risks and increase the speed of adoption.

In May 2019 LNS Research attended AspenTech’s annual user conference, OPTIMIZE 2019 in Houston, Texas. This year's event drew a broad range of attendees ― in all 1,000 from 300 operating companies and ten leading universities, across 50 countries. The software vendor was also joined front and center by a major partner, Emerson, which showcased the integration of its Mimic™ Operator Training System (OTS) with AspenTech's HYSYS simulation software, and its expanding set of asset optimization services for typical customers. With some 150 breakout sessions, it was impossible to cover all tracks, so I spent the majority of the time focused on asset performance management.

2019 marks the third consecutive year LNS Research has attended and covered Gensuite’s annual customer conference. This year’s edition, BREAKTHROUGH: Gensuite Conference 2019, was held in Cincinnati May 5-7. The event spanned the environment, health, and safety (EHS) software vendor’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and Gensuite experts were on hand to convey how the company’s solutions enable breakthrough operational performance improvement across EHS, risk, security, sustainability, and quality among others.

Several of my observations have been fairly consistent over the past few decades of working in quality, technology, and as a quality research analyst and thought leader. Four stand out as primary reasons why quality, and often the industrial organization at large isn't able to transform as quickly or successfully as they'd like.

In April 2019 LNS attended the first annual IBM IoT Exchange event held in Orlando, FL. The company focused its three-day conference on how to achieve operational efficiency and effectiveness, and reduce costs through the application of IoT data and artificial intelligence (AI).  The conference marked the first time that users of IBM’s engineering lifecycle management (DOORS family), enterprise asset management (Maximo portfolio), facilities lifecycle management (TRIRIGA), and the Watson IoT Platform solutions all met together under the Watson IoT umbrella.

Plex Systems held its annual PowerPlex user conference in Detroit the week of May 13, 2019, with just over 1,000 attendees and a few dozen sponsors across technology partners and systems integrators. A group of high schoolers were also in attendance, demonstrating their very cool entries for the FIRST Robotics competition; during the event Plex announced a $40,000 donation to this organization that works to inspire young people's interest and participation in science and technology.

As we study Industrial Transformation (IX) at the macro level, we seek leaders among industrial companies for further insights. We recently interviewed one of those leaders, ABB’s Chief Digital Officer, Guido Jouret, who reinforced our best practices findings from the recent IX survey.

Digital Transformation has become one of the most hyped terms in business today. Google it, and you’ll get over 27 million hits in less than a second. Every tech vendor seems to have a blog about how its products or services can help a business with its Digital Transformation journey. With so many resources available, why is achieving true transformation such a struggle? To understand what’s going on, let’s go back to the basics.