ARC Advisory Group recently conducted a web-based survey in conjunction with CHEMICAL ENGINEERING magazine to gain an external perspective on best practices and strategies for issues related to Operational Intelligence and previously Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) software.

This PowerPoint report summarizes the survey results and provides recommendations for ARC Advisory Service clients.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Energy Management – Automation spanning from metering to the ERP level, and from product sales to solution business.

• To make production more energy efficient (passive energy management)
• To enable the user to react to changes in electricity/commodity prices by adjusting production (active energy management)

   

  Key Trends

NASA launched the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), a robotic space probe mission to Mars, on November 26, 2011.  This mission successfully landed the Curiosity Mars rover in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012.  The overall objectives include investigating the planet’s habitability, studying its climate and geology, and collecting data for a future manned mission to Mars.

The worldwide enterprise software market returned to growth in the fourth quarter of 2016. The enterprise software market has expanded on the back of relentless innovation and available capital.  Once again, exchange rates played a role, with the marginal weakening of euro relative to the dollar.  This 1.5 percent exchange rate fluctuation provided a slight lift to revenues reported in euros that ARC subsequently translated to US dollars for this report.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is all about connecting physical “things,” with each other and with software applications for data acquisition, analytics, and visualization.  In the industrial, agricultural, and transportation worlds, identifying the location and monitoring the condition of critical things, or assets is emerging as a key application for IoT.

While the numbers are still not great overall, preliminary ARC research indicates that the ongoing decline in China’s total automation market levelled off gradually from first through third quarters of 2016, then moved into positive growth territory in Q4 2016.  This followed significant declines in orders throughout 2015, with the worst performance seen in Q4 2015.

IIoT is being applied by original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to remotely monitor its equipment at the customer’s site and assess its condition. Using analytics, the OEM identifies an emerging problem with a specific machine, and sends an alert to the appropriate customer.  This form of predictive maintenance is intended to prevent unplanned downtime.  However, these alerts often don’t get to the right people within the plant, leading to equipment failure as predicted. 

India’s information technology (IT) services industry continues its up-ward momentum in the third quarter of financial year 2016-17.  In this report, we analyze the revenues of India’s IT services sector for the third quarter and compare these with the same period the previous year.

ARC Advisory Group analysts attended the OSIsoft EMEA Users Conference in Berlin, Germany in September 2016.

Today, your plants may be operating well and delivering what you con-sider to be a satisfactory level of performance.  They’re producing product, your customers are satisfied, and (hopefully) the business is operating “in the black.”  But have you taken the time to consider whether your plants could do more to improve the business’ bottom line?