Platform & Resourcing Choices For Your Industry 4.0 Business Transformation Journey

INTERNAL RESOURCES, OUT-SOURCED OR HYBRID APPROACHES

ABSTRACT

The promise of the benefits that can be reaped from Industry 4.0 big data and predictive analytics through access to machine and operator data is compelling enough for most manufacturers to seriously direct their IT and OT departments to look into ways to enable such machine and operator data acquisition.

Historically manufacturers have been focused on yield (quality) improvements only. However, this is just one third of the equation, since equipment availability and performance also directly affect revenue and margin. Being able to optimize overall equipment effectiveness or OEE in terms of equipment availability, performance and the quality of items produced by the equipment is the Holy Grail for manufacturers to improve their bottom lines.

A fully integrated solution requires other aspects of the manufacturing OT and IT infrastructure to be addressed as well. Depending on the scope, GEMBO is able to leverage its partner ecosystem, consisting of Yield Improving Software Vendors, Manufacturing Execution System Vendors and Backend Infrastructure Vendors, to augment their solutions in order to be able to deliver an end-to-end transformational OT/IT solution.

In the quest for big data and predictive analytics the question of rolling a solution in-house vs. outsourcing comes up inevitably. Given the many aspects of a well-designed solution, it is instructive to look at the pros and cons of in-house vs. outsourced.

BENEFITS PERCEPTION OF INDUSTRY 4.0

Rather than focusing on a laundry list of items to consider pros and cons for, it is more useful to boil this list down to the following six KPIs to measure and compare both approaches by:

Flexibility: The ability to add-on new features or to modify existing features.
Resources: The effectiveness and availability of human resources.
Speed: The ability to meet project timeline goals.
Know-How & future-proofing: The Domain expertise to ensure project success.
Cost: The cost of human resources and cost impact on other projects.
Ongoing Support: The resources needed to ensure post-project success.

The following presents an analysis on how each KPI may play out in both cases.

KPI	In-House	Out-Sourced
Flexibility	Maximum control over resources, but impacted by effectiveness and availability of resources as well as cost in case of new skill sets and expertise and if resources must be shifted between projects.	Varies depending on the Ts & Cs agreed upon for ongoing technical support, whereas new add-ons and modifications are fulfilled through ramp up and ramp down of resources without impact to other projects.
Resources	Resources are almost always in short supply and may not have the range of expertise required to deal with specific project areas and dynamically shifting resources between projects almost always meets with significant resistance.	Projects are usually resourced with the right number of people, skill sets and expertise to deal with the full scope of the project and dynamically shifting resources between projects is restricted by contractual obligations to meet project goals.
Speed	Speed is directly impacted by resource effectiveness and availability, and therefore project timeline goals are directly impacted by resource limitations.	Projects are usually resourced with the right number of people, skill sets and expertise to deal with the full scope of the project and therefore impact on project timelines is minimal.
Know-how & future-proofing	Resources are usually behind on state-of-the-art due to a lack of project-specific specialization, which not only negatively impacts the implementation, but also risks that the solution will quickly become outdated.	Specialization is paired with know-how on the latest technologies, which enables efficient implementations and helps with future-proofing the solution, avoiding future costs of having to redo parts or the whole solution.
Cost	Cost of resources will increase if people with new skills and expertise have to be hired, and/or in case other projects are impacted by shifting resources.	Human resources are temporarily assigned and reduced as the project winds down to a minimum as required for ongoing technical support.
Ongoing support	Ongoing support is at risk since employee turnover can leave significant gaps in skill sets required to fix bugs, implement enhancements and/or add features.	Ongoing support is customarily part of the agreement, securing the resources necessary for bug fixes, enhancements and/or feature additions.

Practical use of this table consists of assigning a ranking for each case for each KPI and computing the total. Among these KPIs perhaps the one that stands out the most is for the know-how and future-proofing of the solution. For example, the IPC – Association Connecting Electronics Industries® recently created the Connected Factory Exchange or IPC-CFX standardized data exchange protocol as an enabler of Industry 4.0, Smart Factory and Digital Factory solutions. Awareness and understanding of IPC-CFX is likely not the focus of in-house IT staff, but certainly within the scope of GEMBO and its partner Aegis Software.

In our experience the ranking of the above KPIs may change a lot between the first project and subsequent ones. Usually the first project is the one with the highest risk and least chances to succeed if done entirely in-house. Therefore, the ideal approach may be a hybrid one, in which a joint team is formed, consisting of internal personnel and expert external resources, and where the first project heavily relies on the expertise, skill sets and full presence of the external experts, while for subsequent projects the internal resources take on a larger role.

GEMBO and its partners are able to deliver end-to-end Industry 4.0 smart factory solutions to manufacturers, spanning the full scope from machine and human operator data acquisition to OEE KPIs, predictive maintenance, as well as comprehensive MES functionality. Through our combined resources, skill sets and expertise in implementing and rolling out Industry 4.0 smart manufacturing solutions we are able to score consistently very high against each KPI in the above table.

CONCLUSIONS

Internal resources are usually behind on state-of-the-art due to a lack of project-specific specialization, which not only negatively impacts the implementation, but also risks that the solution will quickly become outdated. On the other hand, an outside entity can bring the required levels of specialization paired with know-how on the latest technologies, which enables efficient implementations and helps with future-proofing the solution, avoiding future costs of having to redo parts or the whole solution. Deep specialization of GEMBO in digital twin connectivity and predictive analytics combined with Aegis Software’s expertise in MES and the IPC-CFX standardized data exchange protocol assures future-proofed end-to-end smart manufacturing implementations and deployments.

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