What Is The ROI Of A Spanner?
Co-founder of Senseye. Lover of technology, cars and cats. Filling out requisition forms (e.g, Explain how this spanner will support your role as a maintainer) is, unfortunately, a necessary evil weve all had to deal with. (If you have had to do this, Id love to hear about it.) In asset-intensive industries, digital acceleration is no longer a luxury. An ROI analysis is not performed on a corporate firewall, your enterprise asset management software or your safety boots. These tools transcend base financials, focusing instead on enabling business outcomes, allowing everyone to work efficiently and safely, and removing risk from day-to-day productivity. For some time now, predictive maintenance (PdM) has been recognized as a top use-case for digital acceleration  an essential tool to smooth the path to operational and maintenance efficiency by using AI to understand thousands of signals concurrently to predict when machines will fail, allowing human maintainers to repair them ahead of time. This allows organizations to focus on business objectives and outcomes rather than the daily stress of running from fire to fire. The fact that Amazon has now directly invested in developing and selling solutions in this area is solid proof of the validity of this technology. Sometimes benefits from investment in technical capabilities can only be seen when looking back. Trying to understand how soon those investments would have returned their full costs ad-nauseam would have destroyed the subsequent benefits that can now only be observed when looking back. Some investments need to be made because theyre a foundation for the future  even though you cant yet see it. Risky approaches deserve careful consideration, of course. There are many valid reasons why the rush to be second place exists. There has been solid evidence for the ROI of PdM through operational efficiency in a number of industries, including aerospace and defense for decades. But its only with the advent of Industry 4.0 and the ubiquity of processing power to enable modern approaches to machine learning that the costs of continuous and complex analysis have come down enough to make PdM viable for the everyday machines like motors and servos, valves, robots, lifts, compressors and conveyors that are the vital connective tissue of almost every modern industrial operation. In his book Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore describes the challenge of an innovative new product making the leap from early adopters to the early majority  the emergence into the mainstream. PdM is in this chasm and, while I dont believe theres a danger of it disappearing downward, theres a danger that too many companies will fall into the laggards category. But there's no excuse for companies to find themselves here, especially when McKinsey has shown that PdM is eradicating unplanned downtime and costly repairs in the oil and gas industry. Other than PdM, organizations should consider mobile worker enablement, increased traceability and automated process tuning for their digital acceleration efforts. Each of these can be analyzed in detail to try to understand ROI, yet were at the stage in the market where this often isnt completely clear. What is clear, however, is that not investing further in digital acceleration (Industrial IoT, Smart Industry, Industry 4.0 or whatever other name is fashionable in your area) is akin to refusing to invest in the internet or computerization. Organizations treating digital acceleration initiatives as theoretical innovation projects and wondering what the ROI is wont be taking second place to their competitors; theyll be left in the dust. Those agonizing over ROI need to ask themselves if theyre falling into the trap of worrying that something is a fad. Every world-changing innovation has likely been accused of being a fad at some point. But perhaps you should be less worried about ROI and instead look at other factors like availability, productivity and opportunity cost. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives.