The Supply Chain Matters blogs highlights Internet of Things platform provider Altizon, and its recent partnership announcement with a prominent India based design engineering and manufacturing process development services provider for joint Factory of the Future development efforts.
Prediction Seven of The Ferrari Consulting and Research Group’s 2019 Predictions for Industry and Global Supply Chains (Full report available for complimentary downloads in this site’s Research Center) calls for continued shifts of business focused advanced supply chain management focused investments in the coming months. Priorities will essentially originate from external and internal line-of-business or overall strategic investment needs.
In the specific area of Internet of Things (IoT) enabled processes, we believe that pilot deployments and overall process learning will continue, and that wider-scale deployments will remain deferred until the cyber-threat landscape has built-up more credible defenses, or that individual IoT technology and services providers add more practical and risk-aware information protection safeguards including encryption.
All of that stated, meaningful initiatives are underway.
This Editor has the opportunity to have two briefing sessions Vinay Nathan, CEO of IoT platform provider Alitizon. Among this India based technology provider’s technology offering is the Datonis IIoT Platform, which among other functions, provides customers with a robust set of connectors and an API to integrate IoT data into ERP, CRM and Business Intelligence systems.
What drew our interest to speak with CEO Nathan was the platform’s stated objective in providing comprehensive security for devices and their access. Users have the ability to setup access rights for devices and associated users that control the actions that they can perform. An audit trail of every action is performed to prevent misuse and prevent misconfigurations. Data isolation policies govern how data is physically stored and retained or backed-up for future retrieval. Nathan reinforced that businesses are indeed very aware of data security needs but the ability to effectively demonstrate data security safeguards in managed pilot implementations help to assuage concerns. Our conversation further included which industries are viewing IoT enabled processes as strategic to business needs.
In that vein, we call reader attention to the recent joint partnership announcement involving Alitizon and AXISCADES.
Bangalore India based AXISCADES provides design engineering and manufacturing process development services to a number of global manufacturing companies including heavy equipment, automotive and aerospace manufacturing. The company recently announced the opening of a Digital Center of Excellence to feature Industry 4.0 technologies that include Industrial IoT and Edge systems development. This services provider has had a long multi-year business relationship with Caterpillar Inc., among other manufacturing clients.
This new joint partnership calls for both providers to synergize their combined IoT and digital transformation offerings to build ‘factory of the future” pilots and operational processes in aerospace, automotive and heavy engineering customer venues, including commercial aerospace industry. Noted are specific areas related to: “Industry 4.0 transformation, modernizing Asset Performance Management services and launching new business models for service delivery, among other processes.”
The Supply Chain Matters blog has featured quite a number of blog commentaries focused on the multi-year scale-up of aircraft production to respond to unprecedented, multi-year backlogs of new aircraft orders. Manufacturing automation remains a key strategic thrust, as are ongoing sensitivities to intellectual property protections and data security.
Our recent briefing led us to conclude that IoT enabled Service Management business process enablement along with Manufacturing shop-floor IoT enabled process development are indeed part of the planned agenda for both of these firms. Because of industry sensitivities, Private Cloud deployments are planned for initial piloting, as is a custom data security architecture, each leveraging the Alitizon platform. The companies plan to conduct joint sales and marketing efforts focused on the North America region.
As CEO Nathan noted, this is an industry that has the strategic window to be able to pilot, test and and deploy such initiatives over a multi-year horizon. It is an industry with a lot of acquired learning in manufacturing process development for complex, regulated processes and in adherence to data and information security standard needs.
Our ongoing guidance is that business objectives and process development needs prelude advanced technology enablement decisions, Thus, a globally recognized design engineering and manufacturing process development services provider teaming-up with a select IoT platform architecture and software capabilities at the surface manifests this approach. Lead with the objective and the required process.
For all of the above reasons, we will continue to monitor this partnership for future updates and developments.
Bob Ferrari
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