Change and Opportunity: The Industrial Technology Horizon

By Kerry Grimes

Kerry Grimes

A backdrop of global economic uncertainty and accelerating technological change has given manufacturing industries plenty of challenges and opportunities.

Plant owners have faced headwinds during and since the pandemic, adapting to the triple tumult of disrupted supply chains, spiking inflationary costs and remote working.

Seizing Opportunities from Changing Models

Future core industrial technology trends will center around seizing open opportunities from our rapidly changing global operations models.

Doing business in today’s global economy demands a flexible and agile approach, where software is used to maximum effect to ensure resources are well-allocated, waste is minimized and forecasting is optimized.

This new reality has been made possible by the rapid evolution of HMI (human machine interface) technology, which allows workers to access richly illustrated SCADA or HMI applications from smartphones, tablets and panel PCs.

Site managers will be increasingly able to remotely monitor what is happening on-site and can effectively control plant operations from afar — and from almost any device.

HMI and SCADA will be able to display ever more powerful and intuitively presented data points to help supercharge plant operations. Advanced HMI will provide the competitive edge in workplace productivity.

By taking up subscription models, customers can acquire and scale emerging technology solutions as their business evolves. This means customers can reduce their initial investment in industrial technologies and increase returns over time by leveraging the latest software to take advantage of market opportunities.

In the coming years, we may even see plant equipment sold on more of a leased or utility basis, too — in the vein of how the carrier air conditioning model evolved.

Traditionally, air conditioning firms used to sell physical air conditioning units. Now they often sell the service of keeping your room always cool at a certain temperature. I predict that industrial companies will sell both plant equipment and software services at the same time and be measured by the service level.

Evolving Sales Models

Today’s successful supply chains are powered by agile, efficient and sustainable operations. This trend will open a growing market for subscription models to promote organizational resilience, while also enabling channel partners to transition to recurring revenue models.

This evolving sales model will require increased customer intimacy in the form of continuous customer success management (CSM), meaning industrial channel partners will need to improve their engagement capabilities and selling notions.

The new sales model will disrupt cash flows and require investment in the short term. However, in the long term, partners and customers will see increased sustained revenue growth and increased valuation of the partner business.

In the future, successful channel partners will lead with the ability to successfully match customers and commercial offers with their organizational vision. The partners that will triumph in the new industrial economy will be those that grow with their customers and support their changing needs amid fast-moving times of challenges and innovation.

Kerry Grimes is global head of partners at Aveva Partner Network. He previously was channel chief at PTC and at Siemens PLM Software, worked at IBM and Vignette and founded software company Rocksteady Networks, which developed a platform for differentiated services on a user-specific basis at the edge of the network. He earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing from the Rochester Institute of Technology and an MBA from the University of Texas in Austin. You may follow him on LinkedIn or @AVEVAGroup on Twitter.