When I pitched to get hired for the job to lead industrial IoT solutions at Arrow back in the spring, my story was that I had been in the orbit of telecom operations for many years, and the concepts from telecom would apply. I had worked on projects that were about streamlining operations, customer experience, leveraging data analytics, implementing digital transformation, and modeling ecosystems. I had l learned that it is the of confluence of people, processes and systems and how they all need to work together that optimizes business results.
The pitch worked and I got the job. Industrial is a huge segment and my direction getting started was to focus on manufacturing. So I started digging. A few months into the dig, interestingly, it turns out that I was actually right, and these concepts apply extremely well straight into the world of industrial operations. So what have my initial observations been?
1. Getting to a state of being data driven and not only optimizing operations but also enabling optimization of new product development with this data is the future vision for manufacturers. Same nirvana exists for telcom companies and they are all working through “digital transformation” programs to get there. Like telecom, manufacturers will not only need to have a strategy for becoming data driven, but they will need to rethink the big picture of how business models change, how being agile can create new business opportunities, and how processes and systems can be used to enable a new strategic direction.
2. However, Data in manufacturing environments is not centralized, not standardized, not clean, and hard to get in cases. Telecom has the same challenge and has spent a lot of effort creating a standardized models to reduce the effort of systems and data integration. This would be a worthwhile effort in manufacturing.
3. There is a big gap between operations and IT – technically and culturally. The operations environment in a factory is often run by a very experienced, hands on workforce. They know their production lines and how they operate. IT is much closer to the business side – coming at manufacturing from a top down perspective. Same divide in telecom. Same challenges apply for getting the operational centric folks to work closely with the IT/software crowd. With software becoming the way of the world, it is playing out is quite interestingly in telecom. The hardware folks who are closer to the high value assets and operations of them own more of the budget, but the IT team knows more about software. Where will the middle be? Who will hold more of the decision making authority? Manufacturing companies are facing the same task of finding the new software centric middle in which to meet.
4. Speaking of software, as companies rely on software enabled solutions like analytics and IoT, workforce skills need to change, too. Telecom is going through this mightily with many of the field staff, technicians and folks who executed manual processes now finding their jobs require entire new skillsets or have been automated. AT&T is spending $1 Billion to retrain its workforce. Manufacturers who want to remain competitive are faced with the same task.
5. Its about maturity. Some manufacturers are very mature and measure everything. They are well on their way. Others might collect some data but not do much with it. A number that I have seen used a few times is that on average only 10% of the data gets used for decision making. Some don’t even know where to start. Again, same parallel in telecom. Some companies have undertaken major digital transformation programs and have high levels of maturity around large scale tasks like customer experience and service assurance. Others still operate by spreadsheet and swivel chair. In telecom, there are many models for measuring maturity. Manufacturers could benefit from a common language to work with their suppliers, partners and customers about their priorities and needs as well.
It’s been an exhilarating and fascinating few months. I look forward to continuing to dig, and applying this into the solutions that we are creating at Arrow.
Contact me if you want to chat about industrial IoT - email iot@arrow.com