Industrial Transformation Blog

Infor CEO, Charles Phillips, is discussing the proposed IPO that has been in the news since the beginning of the year. Serious talk of Infor’s IPO started in January, 2019 with the announcement of a $1.5 billion investment in the company by Koch Equity Development, an arm of Koch Industries and Golden Gate Capital. Of all the major enterprise application vendors, Infor is the largest that has remained a privately held firm.

Understanding the vendor landscape is essential for both industrial organizations as well as solution providers that seek to understand competitors, and the process Digital Twin market is no exception. There is a broad spectrum of Digital Twin vendors across the industry, but basically, they fall into a handful of supplier categories:

KBC, a Yokogawa company, recently released the latest version of its flagship process modeling software, Petro-SIM 7, featuring tight integration with OSIsoft’s PI historian and Asset Framework (AF). With the launch of Petro-SIM 7, KBC introduced a solution for upstream in wellhead to production facilities, refining, and petrochemicals; and in so doing claimed the Digital Twin status.

On Wednesday, April 10, LNS Research hosted the webcast, “Digital Twin: Unlocking IX in Process Plant and Industry.” The presentation revealed the state of the market, clarified what Digital Twin really means beyond the marketing hype, and showed how companies can use it to drive Operational Excellence.

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.

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.

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.