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.

Like manufacturing, asset performance management (APM) has evolved to leverage the digital technology associated with Cloud, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), mobility, Big Data, and the associated analytics. This overall industrial shift has been referred to as both Industry 4.0 (or Industrie 4.0) and Smart Manufacturing. Accordingly, LNS set forth a vision of how APM has evolved in support of these highly digital, capable manufacturing assets which we call APM 4.0.

Uptake has had a busy couple of months, and no one could argue the company is still in stealth mode. Recent notable events include:

• February 2018 - Hires Ganesh Bell as President, formerly Chief Digital Officer at GE Power
• April 2018 - Holds first annual analyst summit at HQ in Chicago
• April 2018 - Announces acquisition of Asset Performance Technologies, Inc. (APT)

In 2013, the concept of Industrie 4.0 was first touted at Hannover Messe, the world’s largest, and most expensive manufacturing show for exhibitors, industrial automation, and equipment. In the ensuing five years, the halls have been full of hype, everything 4.0 and grand promises of what is coming soon. Thankfully, signals from the Messe this year are aimed at delivery on a commercial scale. The Industrie 4.0 messaging spread across dozens of stands has gone, and the stand holders seem to be ready to deliver the first stage of benefits that Digital Transformation promises.

Infor, an enterprise software company, brought together the analyst community at its New York headquarters for another Innovation Summit to share updates on progress and plans for its product set. The Infor senior leadership team, backed by several customers, walked analysts through the entire product portfolio. Often perceived as “the other ERP company,” in the shadow of SAP and Oracle, Infor deserves more credit for innovation and adoption of future trends and technology. Infor was the first of the major enterprise application players to embrace Cloud and user experience, and was a very early proponent of analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). Much of the progress Infor made has been in industries outside of manufacturing like healthcare, transportation, retail, and in standard business functions such as human capital management (HCM). Manufacturing and asset-intensive industries should take note as they will benefit from the advances the software vendor is bringing to the market, in addition to all the Cloud capabilities directly associated with manufacturing in relevant CloudSuites. The Innovation Summit featured several end-users who made it clear they see Digital Transformation as their only option.

LNS joined the Open Process Automation (OPA) Forum in early 2017. A year after, here is our assessment on how far the forum has come and what the remainder of 2018 means. The OPA forum made some considerable progress in 2017, but 2018 will be the real indicator of OPA’s success or failure. The most prominent challenge facing OPA is breaking the mindset that the future must evolve from the past in small steps. OPA needs a mutation to change the way the industry needs. There will be winners and losers in any technology evolution, and the next generation of process control automation systems will be no exception.

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