SI: How does the perception of digital transformation among the plant-floor staff differ from that of senior management?
EV: Although we deliberately did not interview executives for this report, there is a clear difference between plant-level employees and the senior management that I frequently encounter.
Senior management tends to be enthusiastic about the financial and operational potential of digital transformation. Plant-level employees have adopted a very pragmatic approach to IIoT, bordering on cynical. Most O&M professionals have not seen a compelling need for Industry 4.0 practices and expect change to be more incremental.
There is also an acknowledgement of the gap between expectations from plant employees and management. There was much stronger agreement with the notion that senior executives recognize the potential of predictive analytics relative to facility staff.
SI: How important is addressing that divide in terms of optimally adopting these new technologies?
EV: I don’t see the divide, per se, as preventing or delaying deployment. At the same time, given the fact that many industries are dealing with labor shortages, IIoT-based deployments cannot be mandated without providing sufficient resources.
In general, plant employees are more accepting of incremental change, such as the automation of workflows. If IIoT predictive maintenance simply provides new insights to trigger existing maintenance activities, then it will be adopted easily.
However, if plants need to hire data scientists and retrain O&M employees, then more resistance is likely. Ultimately, it’s a function of how IIoT for predictive maintenance is defined and the extent to which tools are easy to understand and use.
To learn more, read "The plant operator's perspective on predictive maintenance" from Smart Industry.
