Investing in Advanced Analytics Technology for Operational Excellence

Advanced analytics, including technologies for predictive analytics, machine learning, and data science, are getting a lot of press and market funding. Recent research indicates that a growing number of executives believe that the right advanced analytics tool would improve their processes.

Growing market for advanced analytics

The industrial market for advanced analytics and machine learning is growing for many reasons.  End-user organizations are making these types of investments to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, improve employee performance and engagement, and, in some cases, offer new outcome-based services.  The software monitors performance by analyzing data based on past behavior, rules, or other patterns and triggers alarms or alerts of abnormal behavior for operators or other employees or an application or device.

The advanced analytics market is growing because manufacturers and operations groups are seeing a lot of value in using advanced analytics and machine learning to increase efficiency and improve decision-making effectiveness.  The technology can remove human bias, enable collaboration with standardized intelligence, and enable faster, insight-driven decision making to improve collaboration.   This can have tremendous value for operations.   In plants around the world, this software is helping to reduce downtime, while increasing product quality and yields.   Additionally, the growth in big data, digital transformation, and cloud capabilities are key enabling technologies for advanced analytics.

But for an industrial organization to invest in advanced analytics and machine learning to increase its operational effectiveness, the analytics tools must be easy to use, intuitive, and visual.

Investment Community Takes Note

Not only are industrial organizations making targeted investments in this type of advanced analytics technology, but the investment community has also taken note.  According to a recent press release, on July 18, 2018, Seeq Corporation, a manufacturing and IIoT advanced analytics software provider, secured an additional $23M in Series B funding lead by Altira Group with participation by Chevon Technology Ventures, nex47, Second Avenue Partners and other investors.

According to Seeq, its self-service software enables process subject matter expert users to rapidly analyze, predict, collaborate and distribute insights to improve production outcomes.  The software can run on-premises, on Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web services cloud platforms, or in mixed on-premises/cloud deployments.  ARC has seen several presentations of actual use cases illustrating how manufacturers and operations are seeing a lot of value from these types of tools.

ARC believes that users should continue investing in analytics technologies to gain or remain competitive in their respective markets.  If manufacturers have not begun investing in analytics, then now would be a good time to start.  Clearly, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies will play key roles in future operational improvements on the plant floor and beyond.