Industrial Transformation Blog

Last week’s job report showed what many of us already knew intuitively. The real economy is bad and will likely get worse before it gets better.

LNS Research has been at the forefront of research on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the technologies’ impact on Industrial Transformation (IX). We all were the first to define the term. We were the first to define an IIoT Platform. With market changes and technology advances we have become convinced manufacturers should be looking beyond IIoT Platforms to a comprehensive view of an IX Reference Architectures. A recent LNS Research Spotlight details our thinking. This blog post focuses on one piece of that Spotlight: what is an IX Reference Architecture?

The NAEM Software, Innovation & Technology conference was held March 3-5, 2020, at the Hilton Riverside in New Orleans. This was the fifth consecutive year I’ve attended this conference, this time joined by my research colleague, Chris Follis. This event gathers the Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) and Sustainability (EHSS) software and technology ecosystem for networking and best practice sharing. There was a consensus among participants that we were lucky the event could even be held, given that COVID-19 pandemic social distancing and travel restrictions were really starting to kick in.

This is the fifth consecutive year I’ve attended the NAEM Software, Innovation & Technology conference, this time joined by my research colleague Chris Follis. It was held March 3-5, 2020, at the Hilton Riverside in New Orleans. The timing of the event was fortunate; it was held right before widescale COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions kicked in.

As I sit in my wee home office in rural Belgium, I am regularly reminded by the most recent news flash that we are in lockdown – do not go out! Unless, of course you are exempted by meeting one of dozens of criteria listed in the government FAQ. It is great to see the threat being taken so seriously; we can only hope the rapid growth in new cases will slow down soon. Even so, we can expect to be confined for a considerable period and continue to support our clients as well as ever.

In a recent LNS Research report on global Environmental Health, Safety and Sustainability (EHSS) software, analyst Peter Bussey discusses the dynamic competitive landscape that has seen significant changes over the past five years. LNS first wrote about this “EHS Software Arms Race” in 2016, describing how market players are using proactive business strategies to pull ahead of the competition in the race to market leadership.

In the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, the public health response was focused on containment, and the advice for industry was supply chain resiliency and risk management. Ensure that sole sourced critical components had been eliminated or weren’t coming from affected regions. In large part, North American and European manufacturing passed the test, due to several factors, including work already done after the Fujiyama nuclear disaster and supplier shifts forced by the several year-old trade-war.

The world is reeling from the COVID-19 crisis that is on course to cause thousands more deaths and precipitate global economic disruption of unknown proportions. What can environment, health and safety (EHS) business leaders do to help their organizations successfully navigate the COVID-19 pandemic?

In December 2019, 60k attendees descended upon Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent. Just like Amazon Web Services (AWS) generally, re:Invent is fast-growing and overwhelms with its sheer breadth of content. With dozens of announcements and multiple keynotes from senior executives, including an analyst-only session with AWS CEO Andy Jassy, re:Invent has quickly become a can’t miss tech event. Jassy clearly took pleasure in the success of AWS, as he should. Started in 2006, after just 13 years, the division has grown to $36B in revenue, is still growing at 35% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), and is Amazon’s most profitable.

In our recent eBook introducing research on the factory of the future (FoF), we show that the factory itself will be a hotbed of innovation and a key provider of vital information to help drive Industrial Transformation (IX). The three pillars of IX—people, process and technology—are all vital to success, but today we discuss the pillar that is probably the most important factor that will determine whether the FoF will deliver its promise or not: people.