Industrial Transformation Blog

Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) solutions provide two traditional functions in the manufacturing plant:

• Support and enforce manufacturing processes and procedures, and
• Bridge industrial automation systems that provide plant floor control to enterprise and business operations systems.

During a discussion on industrial analytics at a recent Smart Factory conference in Columbus, Ohio, an IT professional in the audience said that he planned to upload his machine data to online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes and run Business Intelligence (BI) applications on top of the data. The analytics professionals on stage appeared horrified for a moment and went to great lengths to explain the distinction between industrial analytics and BI.

LNS recently attended the Oracle Modern Business Experience in Las Vegas, Nevada.  Over 6,000 people attended this “unified” event as it was the first time that Oracle had co-located the Supply Chain, HR and ERP Customer summits.  Additionally, the Modern Business Experience was co-located with their Modern Customer Experience events making for complicated meeting logistics.  Oracle is now over $40 Billion in FY 2018 revenues, and they position themselves as the #1 supplier of business software. The scope and scale of their product and solution offerings were on display in exhibitions and a plethora of sessions. 

Field service management (FSM) has generally been the focus of the customer relationship management (CRM) function in many organizations. While a fair percentage of FSM activities have been in the B2C space, there has also been considerable focus in the B2B space as well. FSM initially focused on dispatching technicians to service either broken equipment or to do regular preventive maintenance (PM) to keep clients happy. The functionality was to get technicians to the right locations, with enough spare parts to service equipment and cost-effectively minimize outages.

Commitment matters, whether it is in a romantic comedy, real-life dating, or Industrial Transformation (IX). In a relationship, it is imperative that there is a “real commitment” for the relationship to progress and succeed. To make romance hard, romantic comedies and scuttlebutt tell us that determining if your partner is committed to the relationship can be difficult. Despite their pronouncements of love, “real commitment” can be elusive.

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.

Environment, health and safety (EHS) 4.0 digital transformation initiative isn’t an all or nothing proposition.Organizations need to assess their current foundation of people, processes and technology capabilities to determine the Digital Transformation readiness of their EHS business function. Each organization will have a unique starting point. For some organizations, it may be appropriate to shore up foundational EHS, safety, risk management system(s) before or in parallel with undertaking digitalization initiatives.  There is no one-size-fits-all approach.

On Wednesday, March 13, LNS Research hosted the webcast “Digital Readiness for Industrial Transformation: Success Lessons from Real-World Leaders.” The presentation covered the scope, scale, strategy, budget, and organization of Industrial Transformation (IX) programs globally. The session also investigated the technology choices made in the IX programs, and how these new technology choices balance against Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT).

RIMS is a growing software category that streamlines the submission of human medical products—including pharmaceuticals, biologics, and medical devices—to regulatory agencies, ultimately to gain authorization to sell the said product in a given market. In general terms, Regulatory Information Management Software (also known as Regulatory Information Management Systems) are software systems that: