Digital transformation for machinery & component manufacturers
Published on 02 Sep 2020
The innovation challenge exists because digital transformation cannot be solved with technology alone
Digital Transformation is much more than a technology play. It’s a key driver for the survival of businesses across every industry in every market in the world. It’s also an opportunity to overcome barriers and challenges to innovation. To leverage innovations to improve core operations. To reimagine business and create true business value. To become a disruptor, not the disrupted.
We have left the age of gut-driven decisions and have entered a world in which there is no such thing as a good decision made without data. With rapidly changing business requirements, employees can easily get bogged down complying with customer data security or data use requirements, leaving the organization struggling to keep pace.
The answer to overcoming this data glut, and enabling innovation, can be found in the perfect orchestration of technology, such as machine learning, to create human-machine partnerships that allow companies to maximize their effective use of data to better prescribe and predict the changing customer environment, and to deliver on those more innovative experiences that customers desire.
The State of the IM&C Industry
Industrial machinery and components (IM&C) manufacturers provide the equipment that enables businesses globally to operate the industrial devices needed to operate and optimize their own businesses, across a variety of other industries, such as energy, healthcare, automotive, semiconductor, consumer products, transportation, and telecommunications. It’s a heavily B2B market, so winners in the IM&C industry are under pressure to keep pace with their rapidly innovating competitors, while juggling the need to cooperate and collaborate with players that may, in some respects, be competitors, partners, suppliers, or even customers, depending on the situation.
Like many industries, individual vertical units (such as R&D, sales & marketing, supply chain management, manufacturing, and services) often operate in independent silos. More progressive firms are, however, intelligently applying technology, business process, and data insights to an increasingly complex supply chain, both vertically within the company and externally with suppliers of raw materials, component parts, subassemblies, and even completely subcontracted finished goods.
IM&C is one of the longest-standing benefactors of the proliferation of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). With manufacturing machinery becoming increasingly smarter and connected, the opportunity to use analytics to maximize uptime has led to a technological revolution on the shop floor. With the proliferation of embedded software, communication devices, and innovative sensors, industrial machinery and equipment is now much more dependent on robust data storage and transfer abilities such as big data, machine learning, and predictive analytics.
