Omni-channel commerce is all about the convergence of channels to provide a unified brand experience for the customer. Each channel has its own experiences, advantages, and challenges. The key is to connect the business processes and technology to create a holistic brand experience. This requires maintaining control over the customer experience at all stages in the buying lifecycle: before, during, and after the sale.
ARC Advisory Group's quarterly Automation Index shows that the business development for automation suppliers over the last quarters has been negative, with the global index contracting for two quarters in a row. North America in particular was hit hard by the decline in oil & gas-related investment, a sector that had pushed growth in the automation market there in recent years. Europe showed a sluggish, if overall stable trend. The worsening economic situation in China caused the overall Asian index to decline.
A series of acquisitions in the robotics and motion control market reaffirm the largely untapped opportunity for innovative automated solutions in discrete manufacturing. Traditional automation solutions continue to offer relatively modest, but steady market growth. However, Omron and Teradyne are investing in autonomous robotics and collaborative robotic technologies that offer the potential to drive market growth by dramatically expanding the market for these types of robotics solutions to new manufacturing segments.
At ARC Advisory Group's thirteenth India Forum held in Bangalore, industry organizations and automation suppliers shared their respective visions on how contemporary and next-generation technologies can transform manufacturing in India. A major challenge in this transition is understanding the people-technology interplay, and optimizing it to drive business goals.
As mentioned in previous ARC Advisory Group reports, a number of owner-operators in the upstream oil & gas sector, particularly those with significant offshore and subsea production assets, are looking to multi-phase flow metering (MPFM) technology as the "holy grail." Accurately measuring multi-phase flow is challenging under any circumstances, but particularly so in today's increasingly demanding offshore and subsea operating environments.
The business need for more automated and efficient operations has led end users in industrial plants to accumulate large and increasingly complex collections of operations-related information technology (IT) solutions. Each solution in itself can represent a combination of custom-configured software and hardware products.
As with the plant's physical assets, these collections of IT solutions, plus any associated custom intellectual property, can represent a significant investment in time, money, and effort.
Process safety systems, the associated safety field devices, and other components of a process safety system must be certified to conform to the IEC 61508, IEC 61511, or ISA 84 safety standards. The complex processes and procedures for certifying these devices are not always well understood. ARC Advisory Group has also observed some confusion in the marketplace about which certification organizations have the appropriate capabilities to perform the certification.
Due to a combination of improved ease-of-use and more attractive pricing, the consumer market for unmanned aerial vehicles - or "drones" - has skyrocketed. DJI, the leading vendor of consumer UAVs, may reach revenues of $1 billion in 2015. Much of this enthusiasm has bled over into the market for commercial UAVs, which previously occupied a niche between the media-friendly consumer market and the heavily politicized military market.
At the recent ARC Advisory Group India Forum in Bangalore, executives from Rockwell Automation and Mitsubishi Electric gave presentations that focused largely on the need for manufacturers and other industrial organizations in India (and elsewhere) to migrate to smart systems and strategies and the technology required to connect machines to the enterprise network. The topics chosen by the speakers highlighted the smart enterprise, addressing the requirement to introduce change at the organizational and the production levels through the Internet of Things.
ARC Advisory Group conducted a web-based survey in conjunction with SPAR Point Group in Q3 2015 to examine current and future expectations among users of industrial 3D Scanning.
This PowerPoint report summarizes the survey results and provides some recommendations for ARC Advisory Service clients.
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