How to do a virtual conference right? Ask SAP! TechEd 2020 ran for 48 hours with barely a moment’s pause and attracted over 60 thousand non-SAP registrants. Ten parallel technical tracks allowed everyone to find the level of detail and expertise to suit them and gave access to board level executives, particularly CTO, Juergen Mueller, who gave both day’s keynotes and sat on at least one executive Q&A panel. The stage management and organization of the event is to be heartily applauded. The target audience of technical experts and development leaders of 440,000 SAP customers is somewhat beyond the scope of LNS Research, but there were many interesting announcements about improvement to the development environment and move to the cloud.

LNS Research recently had the opportunity to listen in on Rockwell Automation’s first virtual Automation Fair. Rockwell Automation strove valiantly to replicate the massive Automation Fair virtually: they continued to have Perspective Keynotes, detailed product and technical sessions, hands-on training, a partner exhibit, and even a virtual tour of the Product and Technology showcase. Rockwell Automation is known for its partner and channel-based strategy and this event reconfirmed, yet again, how strong Rockwell Automation’s orientation to partners and channels really is.

It’s been a number of months since we blogged about the progress of APM 4.0. Since then, we have published our new eBook, APM 4.0 Shifts Into Second Gear, which details the trends and LNS Research insights into asset performance management. But it is a fair question to ask, what has been the effect of the COVID-19-induced recession and oil price war on APM? Has interest wained, investment slowed down, and adoption stalled? Or are things still moving full speed ahead? Who’s doing what, and why?

LNS recently had the opportunity to participate in Siemen’s Media and Analyst Conference (MAC) held virtually this year because of the pandemic. While this year’s event held fewer presentations, the company still demonstrated that the pace of change at Siemens Digital Industries is accelerating.

Revisiting the Black Box

One of the questions that LNS Research often gets is how to explain Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) not only to plant personnel, but also to operating management, in such a way so that they can understand them sufficiently to place a reasonable degree of trust in them. In other words, enough to allow their adoption for predictive maintenance and other data science-based applications.

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.

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.

A recent LNS Research article highlighted the need for Industrial Transformation (IX) exemplars, identified three major reasons why IX programs stall, and four major areas that companies need to focus on for ensuring a robust and scalable IX program.

On Wednesday, December 11, 2019, LNS Research hosted a webcast on “Industrial Transformation (IX) in Aerospace & Defense". The presentation covered the scope, scale, strategy, budget, organization and technology choices of Industrial Transformation (IX) Programs globally and in the Aerospace & Defense (A&D) industry specifically. We also looked at another regulated industry, Life Sciences, to validate our conclusions as to why A&D companies are leading in IX. The session concluded with detailing the 5 Best Practices for driving IX. Here we will look at the 6 most common questions that came out of that session.

Industrial Transformation, or IX, is new. There is no play book. There is no proven methodology. There is no exemplar. The improvement programs of the last generation are clear – Toyota and Lean, GE and Six Sigma, Dupont and Operational Excellence, among many others. But why were these companies successful in these endeavors – and why did they share them with the world?