Industrial sectors are at a crossroads. Businesses are struggling to drive productivity growth and post gains year over year. Yet, key components of the equation — suppliers, manufacturers and consumers — are all linked more closely than ever before by a network of connectivity.
For businesses to prevail and prosper in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they need to fundamentally change how they think about and use technology. Technology investments must improve how people and machines work together. That’s precisely where industrial AI comes in.
Not only is industrial AI redefining how goods and services are produced and exchanged, it’s transforming businesses’ ability to effectively deliver choice and convenience to customers.
Why has legacy technology failed to solve industrial-scale problems?
Legacy systems like ERP and CRM were a big step forward. But they largely improved business processes, not business outcomes.
It starts with the gold mine of data that industrial businesses are sitting on, which legacy systems simply aren’t designed to use. This includes valuable machine data that reveals financial truths about revenue-generating assets.
Legacy systems cannot deliver the financial results that today’s industrial businesses are measured by. The good news is that this no longer has to be the case.
What if closed technology systems had an intelligent feedback loop?
Across the many different functions that support critical industrial assets — areas like operations, maintenance, engineering and finance — business units have had little to no choice but to use fragmented point solutions that exist in individual silos.
At best, they invest a significant amount of time and money just to get these disparate systems to talk to one another. At worst, they don’t communicate with or learn from each other at all — they keep on living in silos, and the valuable insights contained within have limited impact.
But what if that no longer had to be the case? What if there was a feedback loop?
The diagram below shows how an intelligent industrial platform breaks down technology silos, connecting disparate systems to unlock previously inaccessible or overlooked data. It establishes a single source of truth from this information, linking business KPIs to data that can help move the needle.