2015: a year of transformation in industrial manufacturing
As 2015 comes to a close, this has been a truly exciting year in industrial manufacturing—a year of transformation.
Across the industry and around the world, today’s digital technologies are enabling industrial manufacturers to transform themselves, to turn themselves into digital businesses. And they are embracing it.
This especially sunk in for me during my international travels this year. From Ireland to Germany and the Hannover Messe industrial fair, we saw tremendous examples of business leaders applying Internet of Things (IoT) concepts to create efficiencies and reduce the cost of doing business.
But beyond transforming business operations and productivity, we also witnessed its powerful potential for industrial manufacturers to not only disrupt their own processes and work smarter, but to disrupt business models and even disrupt entire industries.
The digital disruption
With IoT’s connectivity, rich data platforms, and the unlimited computing capacity of the cloud, part of the digital disruption that is happening is the creation of new, fourth generation manufacturing systems.
Rockwell Automation and Microsoft, for example, recently announced a mobility co-innovation project designed for industrial environments, using a modern, mobile-first architecture to improve productivity and collaboration where a wireless network connection is not always reliable.
These types of new infrastructures are also extending way beyond the factory floor and beyond the operations of the industrial world, creating new global systems of intelligence like we’ve never seen before.
A great example of this is the new partnership that power and automation tech leader ABB and Microsoft are bringing to the automotive industry, with the worldwide availability of a new electric vehicle (EV) fast-charging services platform.
Combining ABB’s EV fast-charging stations with Microsoft Azure cloud-based services, the new platform will ensure stability, global scalability and advanced management features for ABB customers and more advanced charging stations for EV drivers.
Transforming business models
These types of entirely new, intelligent software infrastructures are helping industrial companies transform their business models, now offering advanced services, and generating post-sales revenue streams, in addition to their usual products. In ABB’s case, its next EV iteration will include proactive maintenance and traffic prediction via machine learning and predictive analysis.
These advanced EV stations will be able to serve in a much larger capacity, enabling other businesses, partners and industries to take advantage of the platform, and we will start to see value-added services that will be integrated, all focused on creating a much better, connected experience for consumers.
Future scenarios could include making charging station reservations based on your route and how much charge you have left; proactively scheduling additional services while you wait like changing your windshield wipers; or having some gourmet food delivered to you.
Another impactful example of how technology is helping manufacturers create new service models is the work that Honeywell Building Solutions is doing to turn the business of intelligent buildings into new, intelligent revenue streams.
As a way to optimize efficiency and better monitor the health of its building control systems, Honeywell developed a data-processing environment based on Microsoft Azure that can ingest thousands of events as they happen. The system compares asset-monitoring data streams to models configured to reflect optimal operating conditions—essentially transforming data into useful and timely information that can detect potential equipment failures, substandard performance, or disrepair.
By being able to process and analyze this data quickly, Honeywell can deliver actionable insight, identify trends as they emerge, and respond more quickly, consistently, and precisely to customers’ needs. Customers can then immediately address the equipment fault or maintenance need in the short term and make data-driven business decisions for facility health in the long term. This allows Honeywell to innovate, improve, and add to its service offerings—while offering its customers significant savings and the ability to improve business processes.
Transforming industries
These types of partnerships are a part of a larger trend we are seeing in a number of industries, where traditional industrial companies, as they transform into digital businesses, are beginning to sell new services and experiences and scale up and go global rapidly. And remote monitoring and predictive maintenance scenarios are prime examples.
Beyond ABB and Honeywell, ThyssenKrupp Elevator is applying predictive maintenance and services to the elevator industry. This fall, it released a powerful, proactive service solution for elevators and building efficiency, giving TKE unprecedented capability to provide real-time prediction of future repairs, component replacements and proactive system maintenance, cutting the downtime of existing elevators in half.
These types of new services are also disrupting and transforming the industries in which industrial manufacturers serve, some, like the elevator industry, that have seen little change since the Industrial Age. And as new doors are opened for other businesses, the lines between industries are blurring.
Accelerating innovation for manufacturers
These are just a few of the examples we experienced this year that showcase how IoT and the cloud are helping industrial manufacturers transform their business, and in turn enabling them to bring new ideas and experiences to traditional industries.
This digital disruption will fundamentally transform how people live—from how we get where we need to go, to how the buildings we use will be designed, to how our cities are built. It’s truly a revolutionary time in so many ways.
2015 was certainly a year of transformation for industrial manufacturers. And the opportunities are just beginning. And in Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to build the intelligent cloud, we will continue to accelerate innovation and business transformation for manufacturers.
We look forward to what’s to come!
Twitter: @sanrav
