Introduction: Data Excellence

Industry 4.0, or the digital, smart and data-driven factory of the future, offers huge opportunities for manufacturing companies. This is because the industrial world is facing rapidly changing challenges, such as finite resources and supply chain disruptions. Digitalisation and data are the gamechangers to meet these challenges and make the step towards Industry 4.0.

How? By starting with Data Excellence. Aggregating, understanding and leveraging the vast amount of data created in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is essential. Through the strategic use of data, any organisation:

• can become more agile
• save costs
• creates an efficient supply chain
• can improve product quality
• optimize thes use of equipment and machinery

The ability to harness data for better decision-making thus determines the future success of a manufacturing company.

Manufacturing companies today face complex challenges. They need to continuously deliver better quality, lower prices and use digital technologies in the production process. This requires advanced data and analytics capabilities. Also because data sets are growing exponentially. Moreover, this is a time of high uncertainty, such as climate change, supply chains changing significantly and international conflicts.

While data excellence can help companies overcome these challenges, we still often see manufacturing companies struggling to use data in the right way.

Research, which surveyed more than 1,300 manufacturing executives, found that only 39% of them have managed to successfully apply data-driven use cases in the manufacturing process.

Another study shows that 72% of manufacturing executives reported that the importance of data has increased over the past three years, but only 17% of them got sufficient value from their data efforts.

Read further and discover how data helps you succeed in the digital revolution the manufacturing industry is experiencing.