Spending on factory data applications will grow from $18 billion in 2019 to just over $27 billion in 2024, a rise of 50 per cent in the period, according to analyst house ABI Research. The industrial and manufacturing sector is seeking to upgrade software systems as new sensing and analytics technologies emerge.
Investment will go variously on new electronic resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution systems (MES), manufacturing operations management (MOM), product lifecycle management (PLM), inventory management, and customer relationship management (CRM) and demand planning.
ERP systems, providing a single solution to monitor the production line, understand fulfillment and automate back-office functions, will account for over 50 per cent of the spend, said ABI. MES software will be the highest growing segment as manufacturers optimize the performance of individual machines.
The compound annual growth in spend on MES will grow by 13.5 per cent, to $2.3 billion in 2024.
Industrial software applications are increasingly using analytics (artificial intelligence) to go beyond straight condition monitoring, to also run predictive and preventative maintenance algorithms, noted ABI Research.
A new report from the company presents the principle vendors in the space, including giants from the IT sector, including Oracle, Salesforce and SAP, and established OT players in industrial manufacturing, such as ABB, GE and Honeywell.
Industry focused software firms, including Dassault Systèmes and Siemens, and start-ups like Katana and Archdesk, are also included.
Michael Larner, principal analyst at ABI Research, commented: “Data underpins activities such as onboarding raw materials, optimizing the production line, organizing the facility, and even to understand clients and the final customer.”
He said: “Supplier propositions are evolving. For example, ERP suppliers continue to add modules such as MES and MOM while inventory management providers are adding demand planning capabilities. Both are blurring segment definitions.
“Data now flows from the production line to the boardroom and, thanks to APIs, between the software applications. Manufacturers should partner with system integrators to design and assemble their data jigsaw,” Larner concludes.
ABI Research has said there will be greater adoption of ‘continuous intelligence’ (CI) technologies in the industrial IoT space, to elevate data analytics “way beyond” traditional maintenance and control operational levels. This is down to the rise in streaming analytics and streaming technologies.
Kateryna Dubrova, IoT analyst at ABI Research, said: “The concept of CI will be consolidating in the IoT analytics market, enabling more advanced analytics in near-real time.
