At OpenText™, we’ve been talking a lot about how to build resilience into organizations. In the latest edition of the Manufacturing Leadership Council Journal, I wrote about the advantage of monetizing data for manufacturers. This is even more important as companies look to establish quick and consistent revenue streams as the global economy recovers.
Data monetization is still quite a nascent discipline so definitions are sometimes a little vague. The best way to think about monetization is the ability to sell or add value internally to all the data available to an organization, rather than simply accumulating, storing and forgetting or, worse still, not knowing they ever had the data.
This definition expands beyond the packaging of new data-driven products and services to encompass any activity that allows you to bring value to your production and business operations. However, the definition should make clear that data monetization is built on a foundation of the data-driven organization that has control of its data. An organization that can capture, clean, integrate and analyze its data to give the actionable insights needed to create real business value.
The rise of data monetization in manufacturing
There’s little doubt that the evolving Manufacturing 4.0 is reshaping the operational and business environments. Industrial IoT is delivering new levels of connectivity. Vast troves of information are being created but it is still primarily used tactically rather than strategically. Digital technologies are being applied to optimize on-going performance but only a few companies are taking that data into their analytics capabilities or blending it with data from other business systems to gain end-to-end visibility.
What we’re witnessing is a digital acceleration brought on by the necessity to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many elements of digital transformation, that may have taken years to properly embed, will now become commonplace much faster. Data monetization is one of those areas.
Data monetization is no longer a future prospect but something that manufacturers have the technology and capabilities to exploit today. Companies that get this right can open up impressive opportunities to monetize their data in many different parts of their business.
We’re not there yet
The sad truth remains that before organizations can benefit from high-value activities such as data monetization, they must become much better at working with and managing data from all the different data sources a modern manufacturer is faced with. These include customer data, corporate information, connected assets, and machine data, production and operations systems as well as externals sources such as social media, weather and environmental, and government and compliance.
Viewed in this way, today’s market-disrupting technologies, such as Industrial IoT, are a double-edged sword. They are pivotal to driving new opportunities, such as data monetization, to transform the way business operates and what it can achieve. However, they place a huge data burden on organizations that must be overcome.
The need for an enterprise-wide integration platform
The computing environment of every manufacturer has become more complex. There are more applications and data than ever before, as well as a mix of legacy and digital systems running over, in many cases, an aging infrastructure.
It’s often said that data is the new oil but if it’s to flow like that, it needs to pass quickly and effectively between all players on the corporate network. Yet, traditional approaches to data integration are struggling in the era of big data. Forrester reports that 93% of firms believe the operational and technical challenges with their integration strategies result in serious business repercussions like revenue loss, losing customers to competitors, and difficulty optimizing processes.
The role of enterprise integration has become fundamental. A cloud integration platform connects applications, systems, and things to move data between various endpoints according to specified integration patterns and security standards. A central platform or digital backbone that provides unified integration across complex and dispersed digital ecosystems of people, applications and things, delivers:
- Complete assurance the correct data is available when and where it’s needed
- Digital communications with 100% of your trading community
- Optimized and automated business processes
- Data consistency and accuracy across enterprise applications
- Increased collaboration and innovation across the business and supply chain
- Near real-time visibility into your business processes and trading partner relationships
When emerging for the current Coronavirus pandemic, the manufacturer whose integration strategy builds business agility and resilience will be best positioned as the global economy recovers.
This is an extract from the Manufacturing Leadership Council Journal article, The Reach of Data Monetization, read the full article here.
If you’d like to find out more about how OpenText is working with manufacturers worldwide during COVID-19, please visit our website.
