LNS Research has long followed the major automation vendors. All are either current LNS Research members or have been in the last few years. Recent developments have prompted us to take a closer look at their strategies, what’s happening, and why. We refer to mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, and entering new markets or strengthening positions in certain industry verticals as recent developments. These "giants" are waking up to new challenges as they seek to grow their businesses.

Some of the most frequently asked questions LNS Research receives when clients are planning to scale in Industrial Transformation (IX) are concerned with DataOps and data contextualization.

Follow the money to see the real story

Google the phrase “Pilot Purgatory” and you will see a raft of press articles about the state of Digital Transformation and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). McKinsey and Company, Deloitte, and a series of other firms have published several articles on “pilot purgatory” in IIoT, Digital Manufacturing, and Digital Transformation. IIoT and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) vendors often exasperatingly discuss the successful implementations they have done at the company’s home office that have not translated into wide-scale rollouts. These vendors curse “pilot purgatory.”

Given all the brouhaha, one would expect that companies deploying these pilots would feel “stuck in” pilot and that getting to a wide-scale rollout was a key challenge in front of their Industrial Transformation (IX) Program. But when we surveyed industrials, we found just the opposite. Few companies felt “stuck in” pilot mode and only a fraction of companies identified “moving out of pilot phase” to be a key challenge. So clearly, pilot purgatory is fake news! Let’s look at the facts and see how we can reconcile these different perspectives.

We all know the reality of discrete and batch manufacturers. If you walk into virtually any manufacturing plant, you will find literally hundreds of manufacturing computing applications being utilized. A few of those applications, ERP most prominently, are generally supported by the corporate IT staff. A wider number of those applications, automation and MES, are typically supported by operations itself via the OT team or the “shadow IT” team (the manufacturing engineers, etc., that are providing day-to-day support to these systems). The vast majority of applications are custom – often built in Excel, Access, or Java – and are not well-supported and virtually impossible to deploy across sites. And, the picture gets worse: despite all these applications, operational personnel are still looking for more technology to help reduce manufacturing costs and improve quality.

Since the advent of Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES, or MOM for those who prefer) in the late 1980s, life sciences, and especially pharmaceuticals finishing and packing, led the way in useful MES solutions. Some would argue that MES for pharma has reached maturity and there are few gains to be made. At LNS Research, we believe that change is just beginning and it is time for the pharma software industry to wake up or get severely disrupted by new players.

Many pharmaceutical companies, ranging from boutique startups to the global giants, have active Industrial Transformation (IX) programs that foresee structural changes in the way they operate. Existing pharma MES systems provide the necessary functionality for most operations but are hard to maintain, inflexible, and do not provide a data platform for other parts of the enterprise. Such integration will, inevitably, be a part of IX programs. 

Seventh Life of MOM - Refined

Almost four years ago, I wrote about the "7 lives of MOM," a vision into the future of MOM architecture, and how it would be deployed. The 7^th life was defined as “No MOM,” where the functionality previously implemented in MOM systems would be distributed as apps across an Industrial IOT (IIoT) platform. This still seems like a good idea to most and the reality is getting closer, but in a different environment than that we had envisioned.

Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM or MES) systems have been commonly implemented in batch and discrete manufacturing plants for many years (Early MES was implemented in the 1980s). The benefits to automation, control, and business are well understood but the number of manufacturers implementing MOM has remained constant in our surveys over the last years at around 20% of factories. There is a multitude of reasons, often focused on the gap between expectations and reality; for example a company might implement one factory and then judge the cost and time of rolling out 20 more completely prohibitive. We have consistently been promised more for less and yet we are still being led down the same path. Things are changing; in this blog we will look at some of the trends that are going to help manufacturers overcome these challenges in the coming year or two.

LNS recently participated in Plex Systems’ annual customer event, PowerPlex 2020, which was held virtually for the first time.  Three themes emerged from the event. 

In our Industrial Transformation (IX) Readiness work, there are many surprising results from the research. Two of the most surprising are:

It should be “event season” except, as my daughter says, “everything is cancelled.”  Vendors have three choices in this era of Social Distancing: cancel their event, postpone their event, or go virtual. iBASEt has gone the “postpone” route with a goal of having their customer conference Excelerate 2020 in the fall.  In the meantime, they briefed LNS Research on their progress.