Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Michele Rossi, Product Manager Automation, Qt
Industrial organizations will significantly reduce hardware overhead by leaning into efficient software capabilities
To keep pace with end-user demands for highly innovative solutions driving Industry 4.0, the focus of automation has expanded from increasing productivity and reducing costs to also improving quality and flexibility in the manufacturing process.
As a result, the software running automation equipment has become harder to develop, deploy, and manage. To produce increasingly complex, automated systems, industrial automation manufacturers must optimize software development processes to boost time-to-market, improve product reliability and meet customer expectations.
How will this evolve in 2020?
Industry 4.0 and IoT introduced new challenges to the industrial market, and as a result, the playing field has changed at an exponentially accelerating pace, including the state of device infrastructure, application complexity, and development. Indeed, as more connected devices generate increasing amounts of data, software applications have become more complex, and hardware modifications have become more expensive – for example, the need to implement ethernet ports or internet switches to hyper-modern embedded devices for remote access-enabled use cases.
Although some consider software complexity the roadblock to industrial automation success, hardware is a more significant challenge, specifically the bill of material costs. Software is cost-effective as it is more flexible than hardware. Hardware products cannot adopt new capabilities without implementing significant, cost-heavy adjustments. No matter how specialized the discipline, cost concerns will never truly go away – and in the next year, there will be continued pressure to contain and lower organization-wide spending to compete in a global market.
In 2020, industrial organizations will use the power of software to overcome hardware cost challenges that are holding back wide-spread industrial automation innovation.
Rather than focusing on the challenges of modern software technologies, organizations will deploy these capabilities to eliminate cost-draining hardware roadblocks. Indeed, over the next year, we will see industrial organizations lean on new software advancements to deliver optimally performing code and minimally-sized data and increase operational efficiency. Specifically, by implementing modern, intelligent, flexible software solutions, industrial organizations can lean on lesser-powered CPU, with or without GPU, fewer RAM chips, or smaller flash disks. This will not only lead to lower overall device creation and maintenance costs but will also reduce total material costs.
As digital transformation across industrial organizations continues to proliferate, software development processes for industrial applications must evolve as well. Investing in technologies that can make the software development process more efficient, streamlined, and cost-effective – without having to continually rewrite code – enables industrial automation manufacturers to innovate at scale and deliver on their customers’ demands.
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About the Author
Michele Rossi is the product manager responsible to drive Qt product focus in the Industrial and Infrastructure Automation industry, working close since 2017 to Automation R&D team. He has strong experience in Automation industry, due to his past background in product management organization in Siemens and ABB.
