The #MondayMusings Industrial Transformation blog series provides insight and analysis for executives from the previous week’s briefings, events, and publications @LNSResearch.

LNS recently attended the Excelerate 2018 Conference in Dana Point, California hosted by iBASEt, a manufacturing execution system (MES)/ manufacturing operations management (MOM) company focused on aerospace and defense (A&D) and complex discrete industries. Over the past years (2015 and 2017), LNS has witnessed a continued growth in customer and prospect participation at the Excelerate conferences. The most quoted statistic of the event was from Tom Captain, the retired Vice Chairman and former Global A&D Leader at Deloitte - there is now $1.7 Trillion in defense spending worldwide.

On Thursday, October 25, LNS Research hosted the webcast, “The Road from Metrics to Analytics for Mid-Sized Manufacturers.” The webcast explored data from the 2018 “Analytics That Matter” survey with a focus on finding metrics used by high-performing companies for financial operations, manufacturing operations, and supply chain management. The webcast also focused on how companies can make a move from metrics to advanced industrial analytics, the best practices for building use cases for analytics, and the importance of an Operational Architecture to support industrial analytics.

On Tuesday, October 16, LNS Research hosted the webcast, “Digital Twin: Discrete Manufacturers Making the Connection from Innovation to Performance.” The presentation explained the state of play of Digital Twin in discrete industries, where it’s going in the coming years, and how this exciting mix of real with virtual for products and assets will deliver endless possibilities to improve performance and competitive advantage in discrete manufacturing .

The goal of a Digital Twin is to have a software copy that behaves as closely as possible to its real-world twin, capturing every single attribute of that physical thing. We are often focused on Digital Twin of a product – because as products evolve their Digital Twin can be updated to reflect the new product, it can also predate the new product. But what about the benefits of having a Digital Twin for assets? Consider a manufacturing plant, we can start with small pieces of equipment that are vital to the production – the more critical that equipment is, the more likely is it that a Digital Twin will deliver benefits. The component, of course, must be significant enough to warrant the (high) cost of developing a Digital Twin or have enough pre-existing models available to construct a first-generation Digital Twin. The key for executives is to understand that Digital Twins can bring immediate benefit to a manufacturing plant (and the products it produces), but they are a long-term play rather than a quick fix.

Our journey through the Analytics That Matter series has shown that the Operational Architecture is a critical factor in building an analytics environment that can deliver value at all levels (descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive). It’s also clear that where Operational Architecture is concerned, one size does not fit all. Operational Architecture is one piece of the operational and data model puzzle manufacturers need to ensure success. Many industrial organizations ask, “Why doesn’t one size fit all?” Let’s explore that statement and explain why right-sizing each element is key for success.

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On Thursday, August 23, LNS Research hosted the webcast, “Analytics That Matter: A Fresh Perspective on Operational Architecture.” The presentation explained the results of the 2018 Analytics that Matter survey and helped industrial executives understand a new dimension of Operational Architecture. The discussion also covered the data and analytics architecture that powers Digital Transformation goals.

LNS Research has published our Analytics That Matter research report (previously titled Metrics That Matter) for several years, with the original research appearing almost a dozen years ago. The 2018 report breaks new ground by moving from a discussion of metrics to a focus on advanced analytics, and putting analytics into LNS Digital Transformation Framework, backed by our recommendations on Operational Architecture.

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.

In our recent work on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and manufacturing operations management (MOM), LNS Research has highlighted the inexorable journey MOM systems are taking as they become an integral part of IIoT-based systems and solutions. Much of this journey, when looked at from the outside, is somewhat haphazard to date as each vendor is doing its own thing. Hopefully, that will change as we move towards MOM 4.0, the seventh life of MOM.

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In my long career in manufacturing operations, I have had many discussions with product design teams for discrete manufacturing. These discussions have ranged from pure delight to taxing because while the product designers were smart and creative they were also somewhat self-centred. Sharing of data has been a natural extension of sharing ideas, goals, and success for those of us who have worked together in design and operations, and data sharing usually resulted  in new products.

Click here to speak with Andrew Hughes