From big data towards new industry prospects

Juha Turunen, Sales Director Analytics and Industrial Internet of Things at Accenture, is responsible looking at where the industrial internet is at the moment and where it might be headed next. According to him, the next steps in attaining the full potential of the paradigm shift lie in big data analysis. Whoever is first to transform their business to harness the power of big data shall be the leader of tomorrow.

All things are slowly becoming embedded with technology, which leads to endless amounts of data, which, in turn, is accumulating into a concept called big data. Because of the significant use of monitoring and analytics technology, the manufacturing industry has a big impact on the amount of big data.

Juha Turunen claims that, as a result, we are approaching a turning point in the history of mankind, one that will transform how wealth will be created, how we work and how companies are managed. In his view the international industrial internet will spread into a wider network first through linking operations inside corporations.

“Many industrial corporations see the industrial internet as a big prospect and are currently building worldwide concepts concerning operations from, for example, maintenance to oil drilling. Companies that used to manufacture only machines are currently investing in intelligent infrastructures and they are already in the phase of transforming the data they gather into efficient solutions for their international clients”, Turunen argues.

Industrial ecosystems of the future will include intelligent ports, factories, power plants and airports. Today we have automated warehouses, in which robots are organizing the workload amongst themselves. Systems like these are also working in material management logistics. In the case of material handling, the progress might lead to the development of systems in which not only machines using a certain closed system, such as a port or a warehouse, work together – machines would also interact with vehicles and ships throughout the logistic chain.

In Turunen’s opinion we are still a long way from using automated systems, which would work independently and interact with different parts in the same value chain.

“At the moment machine intelligence is organized from a single point, a bit similar to an air traffic control, instead of having machines talking to each other and influencing each other in order to achieve a common goal.”

According to Turunen, fresh studies show that the process of gathering information from industrial machines and processes is at an efficient stage, but since the data is not utilized in its full potential, the progress lags. Apparently most of the big industries battle with this issue. The data is still used only for original purposes within departments and remains siloed in the apps.

“Devices currently used in the remote maintenance or monitoring of industrial machines can also be used to gather data, which can be analysed by data scientists case by case. However, what companies are lacking is a process for utilizing the data outside remote monitoring, and at the moment the data is not used systematically to develop products, processes, operations or maintenance. Tapping this unutilized data is at the core of making solutions for the industrial internet.”

Who will succeed in the future?

Today’s industrial equipment and technology company might be an analytics and software company tomorrow. Turunen views this as reflecting the transformation of how companies compete and operate in the field of industrial service design.

“Instead of every company coming up with the same solutions and only considering their own product and service, why couldn’t they cooperate inside a particular business cluster, consisting of, for example, forest, clean-tech or transportation industries. Competition in the software business aims to establish a standard product, which has the most end-users worldwide. We could single out a chain of operation and transportation from a business area such as paper or steel and look at their process horizontally inside a cluster.”

Some companies are already proceeding with this in mind by integrating their service with their customer’s process using the possibilities of the industrial internet.

“The question is who will be the actor, who sees the possibilities in a business like this and who will be the one to take them forward. Many machine developers have a clear head start in this, because they can build an infrastructure over their existing services, which are already part of the process”, Turunen concludes.

Juha Turunen works as Sales Director at Accenture Digital for Analytics and Industrial Internet of Things and is responsible for Industrial Internet solutions for Nordic region.