Industrial Transformation Blog

In a previous article, Three Reasons Why Digital Transformations is So Hard, I did a deep dive into what transformation means compared to just evolutionary change. Two of the three reasons explored in that post deal with the idea that businesses have rarely approached a level of change that qualifies as transformative. The focus needs to be on the business processes and not the digital technology underlying its processes. Industrial Transformation (IX) is the path businesses need to pursue, emphasizing the results, not the technology used to drive those results. But looking back historically this raises the question “is business transformation the same as IX?”

In June, LNS Research attended Siemens' annual Americas user conference ― Automation Summit ― in Aurora, Colorado. This year the automation and digitalization vendor drew more than 700 attendees, including 400 customers and 100+ channel partners. Customers that attended represent diverse industry sectors such as hybrid manufacturing, specialty chemicals, packaging, glass, metals, and many others. The event boasted about 70 sessions, ranging from breakouts to keynotes, Tech Café demos, and an enormous amount of hardware on display ― we focused our time on:

We recently attended the annual Honeywell Users Group – Americas (HUG Americas or HUG) conference in Dallas, Texas. This year’s event drew more than 1,400 attendees, including 675 customers and 200+ channel partners. With some 150+ sessions, ranging from end-user break out presentations, technology solution presentations, workshop and/or training sessions, and roundtable discussions across multiple tracks, the four-day conference was chock-full of content. We had only one day to attend, so we focused on:

• Honeywell Connected Enterprise (HCE) versus Honeywell Connected Plant (HCP)
• Honeywell Forge
• Experion PKS Highly Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE)

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.

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.

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.