2022 Connected Industry Report

The benefits derived from the next generation of Industry 4.0 are expanding beyond manufacturing to cover healthcare, energy, logistics and natural resources. These industries have new opportunities to create value by connecting people, companies, customers, devices, machines, platforms, systems and sites by capitalizing on the rise of IoT, edge-to-cloud, 5G connectivity, data management, AI and ML, and security.

When these technological advances are united in a physical-virtual ecosystem, they hold promise to provide solutions to new business, social, and environmental challenges and unleash unprecedented human creativity and innovation.

Enhancing industrial competitiveness

Manufacturing and healthcare are two industries that are emerging as Connected Industry ‘lighthouses’, illuminating what’s possible – and critical.

In the realm of manufacturing, humans and machines are working cooperatively on the factory floor in ways never before imagined. Together, they’re streamlining and accelerating the manufacturing process to deliver exponential output, quality, efficiency and sustainability gains. This allows manufacturers to ensure the highest standards of plant safety while reducing power consumption and minimizing carbon emissions across the value chain.

Improving people’s lives

More advanced automation and intelligent systems are also transforming the healthcare experience for providers and patients alike. Now, it’s possible to uncover data insights that deliver improved quality, drive productivity, increase cost-effectiveness and ensure optimum care reliability at a time where skills in the industry are scarcer than ever.

As they set out on their journey to achieve digital vitality, organizations need to be mindful of the potential risks and dependencies. With everything now so interconnected, if one part stops or fails, everything in the fabric or chain could potentially be disrupted. 

It’s a team sport in the executive suite

Many organizations are also struggling to understand how best to align internally around priorities at the C-level to appropriately evolve their digital transformation blueprint. Are there competing priorities among stakeholders? Aside from the CEO, what do the CIO, COO, CFO, CDO and CMO specifically care about? What’s top of mind for leaders in the Digital, Strategy and Innovation Offices? Does everyone have a clear and common understanding of what we mean by value and priorities? Is it profit? Compliance? Risk mitigation? Talent retention? 

Digital fatigue

At the same time, in most organizations, there’s a degree of digital fatigue. The pandemic forced people and businesses to invest funds, energy and processes into digitalization but now many are asking themselves, ‘How do we sequence and navigate all of this? How do we adopt and adapt to the huge enterprise investments that have been made in technology?

Earning the right to win

True digital vitality will remain out of reach if it’s approached in an unstructured and uncoordinated fashion. Only once there’s clarity and alignment among all stakeholders will it be possible to navigate the innovation roadmap. Thoughtful, creative and iterative use of technology is the path to overcoming digital fatigue, breaking boundaries and cultivating digital vitality. It’s the key to simplifying the ecosystem and coherently connecting all the moving parts. Compiling and diligently following a structured digital playbook will earn you the right not just to play, but to win.

IoT

Organizations in all industries are looking for ways to use IoT to address key priorities such as reducing cost, improving sustainability, ensuring compliance, improving customer experience, and ensuring worker enablement and safety in a low-touch, automated fashion.

Edge-to-cloud

The rise of connected machines and devices, a distributed workforce and new digital customer channels has seen massive growth in edge devices. Workloads and data processing are now also moving to the edge. Organizations are challenged to connect these edge devices and things (within smart workplaces, smart hospitals, smart manufacturing), then connect the edge to the cloud and then into and across the different clouds, all while ensuring security and governance, either at the edge, in the data center or in the cloud.

Connectivity

There are compelling reasons to consider a Private 5G network in industrial environments. It offers a means to add an additional layer of security to facilities. As we touched on earlier, not only is 5G inherently more secure than other, more traditional forms of connectivity such as 4G and Wi-Fi, it’s also easier to integrate with more modern security technologies. 

Harvesting data

The definition of real-time data in many enterprises has evolved from monthly or weekly reports down to daily and sometimes multiday updates driven by regular batch updates. But today, that’s too slow. We’re living in a world that requires a true real-time enterprise – especially in the industrial data space. Now organizations need to uplift their data management capabilities from both a tools and skills perspective.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning

One of the most pressing challenges is making artificial intelligence and machine learning operational in true real-time using data pipelines. However, these models need a level of expert input and tuning to identify the most useful information and how it should be used. We can’t assume that if we simply throw enough data at it, the model will figure it out. You need to curate the data, tune the machine learning models and put some guardrails around their behavior to get the optimal outcomes.

From the care facility…

In healthcare, remote medicine is being used to address skill shortages. Furthermore the automation of recurring tasks provides a much-needed path to free up care providers’ time to focus on improving the patient experience. 

… To the factory floor

On factory shop floors, robotics is saving man-hours and reducing energy consumption as well as CO2 emissions. Not only do smart digital devices make work happen faster and more accurately, but they’re also inherently more robust and easier to maintain than traditional machines and tools. There’s also no longer the need for these assets to be shipped to facilities to be upgraded or reconditioned, thanks to the software embedded in them.

NTT’s recent research reveals that 92.2% of organizations agree that a trusted technology partner is a key foundation for technology strategies. But what is a trusted partner? We believe the dynamics of the most mutually rewarding client-service provider relationships include a move beyond ‘transaction’ to ‘trust.’

A conditioning partner

We prefer to speak of a ‘conditioning partner’. Think of an elite athlete from any sport that you follow or might play yourself. Even when they’re breaking world records, they still have their elite coaches with whom they regularly engage to learn the best tactics to deploy to drive consistently high performance. Such a coach is responsible for staying up to date on the latest in muscle mechanics, rehabilitation and nutrition, etc. – all the elements that come together to ensure optimal performance while considering all the possible outcomes.

Iterative and agile co-creation of value

So, a conditioning partner doesn’t just focus on the deployment of technology or engage in transactional outsourcing. They focus on ongoing, iterative and agile co-creation of value with their client, coordinating available leading digital technologies. Advancing your digital vitality means exploring the art of the possible through collaboration with providers that are committed to your journey via a thoughtful, pragmatic roadmap – all with a diligent focus on the outcomes for the business.

Before any solution is considered, our agile innovation consultants explore current challenges, business priorities and opportunities in workshops with our client’s senior leaders, workforce and customers. By combining strategic top down-direction with a bottom-up approach, the team assures that interests are aligned, and a solid foundation exists for collaboratively implementing solutions that users love and make a real difference to the business.

A delicate choreography

We emphasize that the path to success is adopting emerging technologies while concurrently optimizing existing assets and infrastructure. It’s not a simple lift and shift operation. Much more, we continue to witness a delicate choreography which sequences many changes in a short time while maintaining balance with day-to-day operations. An important part of this exercise is assessing our clients’ current ‘digital physiology’ across multiple operational dimensions and how this informs the ways they can harness key technologies – what we call our “Digital Vitality Index”.

Illuminating the fundamentals; charting a viable path forward

The Digital Vitality Index illuminates the fundamentals of how and where the client has leveraged digital capabilities and processes, or their absence. Combining this baseline with the Agile Innovation Framework, we determine a viable path to achieving the client’s objectives through mapping key technologies to relevant KPIs. The framework charts a pilot-to-scale roadmap that demonstrates the value of a suite of technologies across a broader digital transformation strategy.

As we conclude a successful pilot, together with our client, we develop industry Playbooks that inform the ways that relevant outcomes can be achieved in additional sites or facilities across our client’s global footprint. These Playbooks help our client’s speed to market in deploying innovative technologies and processes to ensure that the initial investment optimally scales.