Executive Overview
Call it what you will - the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Industrie 4.0, or digital transformation – it really doesn't matter. Pioneering enterprises have started their journey to reinvent and expand their business models using existing and emerging technologies. Companies with the right organizational culture will leverage Internet of Things platforms and associated technologies to grow revenues and cut costs.

Based on the latest European Union (EU) minimum energy performance standards (MEPS), IE2 (High Efficiency) motors can no longer be sold into the region for some fixed-speed application ranges.

One of the biggest challenges facing companies today is being able to integrate, contextualize, and use data from disparate sources. Enterprise manufacturing intelligence (EMI) systems help companies tap into the vast quantities of data they collect and turn those data into actionable information for decision support to help run their assets and operations more effectively. EMI technology can help improve production, minimize human mistakes, and improve efficiencies. EMI systems include components to integrate, contextualize, analyze, and visualize the data.

E-commerce is witnessing a global resurgence based, in part, on increased access to the internet in India and other emerging economies. This creates varied business opportunities that will drive organizations to become more up-to-date and enable increased competitiveness.

Industrial facilities collect lots and lots of data, both from the sensors connected to the control system and other sources, including edge devices in the plant and remote devices in the cloud. While there can be "gold" in all that data, it can also turn into lead if not properly collected, validated, analyzed, and visualized. Data quality is particularly important. Most people would be surprised to learn how easy it is to collect bad data without knowing it. This ARC Insight reviews some best practices in this area.

The automation of industrial processes is a well-established practice, drawing from multiple engineering and technical disciplines. Regardless of the discipline responsible for automation, the skills and competencies required continue to evolve and change in the face of changing technology, circumstances and requirements.

We are entering an era in which companies can detect supply chain risks much more quickly than in the past. AGCO's experience provides a case in point. AGCO is a global leader in the design, manufacture and distribution of a wide range of agricultural equipment. In a discussion with AGCO's Jan Theissen, Director of Strategy and Methods, and Jake Stone, Manager of Supply Chain Risk and Contract Management, ARC Advisory Group learned about this public, Atlanta-headquartered corporation's journey to improve their sourcing and supply base risk management capabilities.

The increasing sophistication of today's advanced industrial equipment often exceeds the capabilities of on-site, general-purpose technicians to diagnose and repair. Increasingly, industrial equipment incorporates computer controls with elaborate interactions among software, electronics, sensors, actuators and other sub-systems. Today's equipment manufacturers also often incorporate advanced science into their R&D efforts to optimize the performance of their equipment.

With substantial parts of the manufacturing workforces eligible to retire in the next few years, a new generation of workers, often with different skills and learning habits, must be trained and up to speed quickly to keep today's increasingly complex plants operating safely, reliably and efficiently.

The new generation of workers, sometimes referred to as tech-savvy "Millennial's" learn differently than do previous generations.

The worldwide enterprise software market continued its year-over-year decline in the third quarter of 2015. The euro depreciated with respect to the US dollar by over 16.2 percent from Q3 2014 to Q3 2015. This exchange rate fluctuation resulted in a substantial negative translation effect on euro-denominated sales and depressed the overall reported growth rate of the market.