These are figures from IHS Markit | Technology, who have also come up with the startling fact that about half of all current IIoT deployments actually fail.
Why? The reasons are myriad, from deployments being hit by planning breakdowns to failing to gather the necessary support and cooperation from critical personnel within organisations.
With Ethernet set to displace Fieldbus as the primary network medium for the first time next year, the transmission of much larger volumes of data and faster connectivity will now be possible, allowing manufacturers to better exploit cloud-based solutions and to look at speeding up product design, as well as enhance inventory management.
While faster connectivity holds great promise in reality, however, many current deployments are actually failing as often as they succeed.
According to IHS Market those failures are happening at the proof-of-concept phase and at the deployment stage of projects.
Companies are investing enormous sums and are simply not seeing the levels of payback expected – they are certainly not becoming more agile or competitive.
Why such a high level of failure? Well, it appears that it can be attributed to inflated expectations. Around 50 percent of companies are expecting to see a payback within one year. Is that realistic? Not really, when many of these projects will take much longer to generate returns.
In response, the authors behind this research have recommended that manufacturers take a number of steps to increase their chances of success. These include determining, in advance, which exact challenges you want IIoT to address; start small, with some pilot projects of concepts to see how the technology can be utilized; obtain senior-level management support for projects and ensure support
from all the relevant functional groups.
Last, but by no means least, get staff involved with deploying the technology. Encourage them to view IIoT not as a threat, but as an augmentation to their job capabilities.
None of these alone will guarantee success but they could go some way to reducing the extraordinarily high levels of failure currently being reported.
