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.

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.

Twenty years ago, businesses were facing a crisis with their IT systems; Y2K. Leading up to 1999 there was a new technology paradigm emerging regarding business IT, the shift from disjointed and independent business and accounting applications to a singular integrated application; ERP or enterprise resource planning. Initially, ERP was mostly just all the accounting functions packaged together with manufacturing resource planning applications (MRP II), but ERP quickly expanded to include human resources (HR), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), product data management (PDM) and a variety of other functionalities.

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.

Every year LNS Research puts forth predictions around the key trends in the Industrial Transformation topics where we focus our work.  In the case of asset performance management (APM), my 2018 forecast focused on the evolution of APM 4.0.  I predicted that in 2018, the most significant shift in APM would be the move away from the maintenance-centric approach that APM was born from 15-20 years ago.  That shift would include enterprise asset management (EAM), computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) and a focus on reliability and downtime reduction. The result would be an emphasis on Digital Twins and showing that prescriptive analytics is more about asset optimization than just reliability and availability. The specific APM predictions were:

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.

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 Tuesday, August 21, LNS Research hosted the webcast, “Solution Selection: Choosing the Right Asset Performance Management 4.0 Partner.” The presentation examined the current APM 4.0 solution landscape and how companies can use the Solution Selection Guide to make a shortlist of potential vendors to support the company’s Digital Transformation initiative.

Asset performance management (APM) 4.0 is a strategy and an approach to maintain and operate manufacturing assets, it’s not an APM 4.0 package that companies can buy “to do APM 4.0.” The APM market is still quite fragmented with few suppliers offering enterprise asset management (EAM) only, others providing just predictive maintenance analytics, while some suppliers offer multiple elements of the APM landscape as integrated and stand-alone solutions. As asset care evolves to allow manufacturers and asset-intensive industries to take advantage of Smart Manufacturing or Industrie 4.0 based digital technologies, businesses need to think about how they are going to maintain these Smart Connected Assets. Big Data analytics, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), augmented reality / virtual reality (AR/VR), and the Digital Twin are critical to future maintenance systems. Trying to categorize all the vendors that provide these technologies can be a daunting task. Pick the wrong set of partners, and you may never realize the benefits of Digital Transformation. Pick the right partners, and you could well outperform the competition. Understanding how to make the right choice of partners is the first step towards APM 4.0.

On Wednesday, June 20, LNS Research co-presented the webcast, “Smart Maintenance: Using APM 4.0 to Drive Better Business Results” with AVEVA, an engineering and industrial software provider. The presentation explained why leading manufacturers use APM 4.0 to achieve balance between maintenance performance and overall economic performance. The discussion included an examination of which industries are prime candidates for APM 4.0, where to begin, and how to assess results.