Piece-meal implementation of IoT systems

As we enter this new era of digitalization, customers are now being presented with several different choices when it comes to IoT platforms.

 If one peruses the internet today, you will find that almost every single major OEM involved in the industrial or energy automation space has now developed their own IoT platform.

Whether they operate in the field instrumentation market, motors or bearing market or PLC and SCADA market, several companies have invested in deploying IoT solutions that monitor their plant assets. The reasoning behind this is solid. Extracting information from these assets and properly analyzing and reacting to the data can result in process efficiencies and savings.

However, this may also pose a large risk down the line, to customers who do not carefully plan the implementation of these systems in their environments.

While SaaS/PaaS are inherently there to provide flexibility, customers should ensure that they do not invest in too many different platforms too quickly. This scenario is reminiscent of several issues faced by the automation industry in the early years when standardization was not inherently practiced by OEM’s. It resulted in plants having multiple different manufacturers with proprietary protocols, all unable to communicate and operate together, creating a maintenance nightmare for plant personnel. A similar problem existed at higher system levels in the IT environment, where point to point communication structures created a spaghetti of convoluted interactions between various applications that become almost impossible to change years later and resulted in major complications during system upgrades.

Investing in one overarching system is possibly the way to go. However, this may come with its own risks (i.e. vendor tie in). In this case however for example, if data lakes are properly segregated from applications, if edge computing architectures and protocols are standardized and if use cases are properly documented, risks can be minimized.

The message is therefore a simple one – If you plan to invest in IoT and reap the many benefits, ensure that you have a meticulously planned the implementation path of these systems and have a long term strategy in place for the management of the system. It will pay off in the long run.