There are lot of changes in manufacturing eco-system these days. You probably heard about many of them. Changes are coming as a result of many factors – physical production environment, IP ownership, cloud IT infrastructure, connected products, changes in demand model and mass customization.
The last one is interesting. The time when manufacturing was presented as a long conveyor making identical product is gone. Diversification and local markets have significant impact. Today manufacturing companies are looking how to discover and use variety of data sources to get right demand information, product requirements and connect directly with customers. Data has power and the ability to dig into data becomes very valuable.
As we go through the wave of end of the year blog summaries, my attention caught Design World publication – 7 Most Popular 3D CAD World Blog Posts of 2014 . I found one of them very interesting. Navigate your browser to read – Top Ten Tech Predictions for 2015. One of them speaks about DaaS – Data-as-a-Service will drive new big data supply chain. Here is the passage I captured:
Worldwide spending on big data-related software, hardware, and services will reach $125 billion. Rich media analytics (video, audio, and image) will emerge as an important driver of big data projects, tripling in size. 25% of top IT vendors will offer Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) as cloud platform and analytics vendors offer value-added information from commercial and open data sets. IoT will be the next critical focus for data/analytics services with 30% CAGR over the next five years, and in 2015 we will see a growing numbers of apps and competitors (e.g., Microsoft, Amazon, Baidu ) providing cognitive/machine learning solutions.
The prediction is very exciting. Future data services can help manufacturing companies leverage data to optimize production, measure demand and help manufacturing a diverse set of product for wide range of customers. However, here is a problem. I guess you are familiar with GIGO – Garbage in, Garbage out. When you deal with data, there is nothing more important then to have an access to an accurate and relevant data sets. Big data analytic software can revolutionize everything. But it requires data. At the same time, data is located in corporate databases, spreadsheets, drawings, email systems and many other data sources. To get these data up to the cloud, crunch it using modern big data clouds and make it actionable for decision processes is a big deal.
What is my conclusion? Data availability is a #1 priority to make DaaS work for manufacturing in coming years. The ability to collect right data from variety corporate sources, clean, classify, process and turn into action – this is a big challenge and opportunity for new type of manufacturing software in coming years. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
photo credit: IvanWalsh.com via photopin cc
