A survey conducted by IFS, the global enterprise applications company, is predicting unprecedented growth for internet of things (IoT) applications in industrial companies in one-year time.
The respondents of the study included executives of manufacturing companies and oil and gas companies.
The study offers the following conclusions:
- Companies collecting IoT data on entire work cells or production lines rather than individual machine components or individual machines has increased by 17 per cent. This enables more advanced use cases, which helps explain a 30 per cent increase in use of IoT to support asset performance management.
- Respondents using IoT to monitor their customers’ equipment saw a 10 per cent increase, potentially signalling transformational approaches to field service management.
Despite these advances, the percentage of respondents who have integrated IoT data streams with their enterprise resource planning (ERP) software hovers at 16 per cent. This reluctance may represent a barrier to leveraging IoT to deliver net new business models or revenue opportunities.
“Enterprise IoT integration allows you to take incoming data from connected devices and use it to create business events in ERP,” IFS Chief Product Officer Christian Pedersen said. “The software can either present that data to humans or act on it as it comes in. Think of the potential for IoT constantly streaming into ERP through the business logic, where artificial intelligence (AI) applications constantly learn and apply that learning by creating new business logic. That is when AI will see the real breakthrough—and when ERP systems will dramatically transform, changing the way we think about them.”