New roles of Control system integrators on emerging markets in Industry 4.0 era

New roles of Control system integrators on emerging markets in Industry 4.0 era

Discussion about roles of Control system integrators (CSI) in emerging markets like Ukraine are not at all hot in public area. Typically, end users and big vendors dominate here with their own agenda. Such agenda are mainly presented by PR -articles or presentations about new products, innovations development on the end users side (big companies) and rarely about new solutions and detailed case – studies of implemented projects. As a result, many such ‘light’ success stories about Industry 4.0 are perceived by professional communities as hype. They expect much more detailed and expert content that explains not just about new technologies benefits but also about customer experience in many other aspects of complex projects. For instance it might be done about project management issues and how to do it more agile under growing demands of speed and quality. Or, about transformation of manufacturing KPI into finance ones. Or, about matching to technical standards. All such aspects are managed by CSI and they are crucial for true project success.

But even if we take such aspects as penetration of new technologies, right market positioning of CSI is a much bigger issue. To a certain extent and due to vendor marketing, CSI are positioned just as ‘integrators’. It means the definition of their roles of different products integration into one customized system. Of course, everybody understands such a system as a complete solution. But everybody including CSIs themselves accepts also several key assumptions in such 'setting of the scene' as

  •  End users are enough qualified to take into account all modern trends in their technical demands
  • Vendors are enough strong to promote effectively their new innovative products and to educate end users

So, CSI should just follow market demand and propose their solutions according to end user readiness. Such approaches might really work in developed countries and more or less they worked previously in Ukraine.

But today's situation appeals to review these assumptions.

In the last 5 years we did not see in Ukraine the true flow of new, Industry 4.0 projects that would be considered as markers for all industries. The rare exceptions of course exist (like on Interpipe) but they do not make a big influence on industries decision makers and many of them continue to consider Industry 4.0 like a big hype. Ukraine has no pilot Smart Factory built on latest technologies as we see in many neighboring countries. Generally, our association (APPAU) assesses the penetration of new technologies 4.0 on Ukrainian market at the level of 5-10%.

When you want to analyze the reasons for such a situation you will realize interesting facts. Many of the new products that make the foundation of I4.0 (like IIoT platforms) are not even commercialized in Ukraine, or not supported (because of the lack of staff), or not even effectively promoted. This is the case of both market leaders, Siemens and Schneider Electric subsidiaries. They still rely on traditional offers and use new products rather as PR-tactics for their branding. As a result there are no cases from these vendors in Industry 4.0 in Ukraine that would become widespread benchmarks for local industries. When you ask managers of these companies about reasons, they will say about small market size, low maturity of end users and lack of resources in their subsidiaries.

So, we can resume that the weak end users' education and their readiness to 4.0 era is not the reason but it is rather a consequence of the weak promotion, education and commercialization campaigns from product and solutions providers. We realize that there are still too many providers in our country which believe that market readiness to innovations looks like a black box that appears one day, and it is not a result of common, well targeted and coordinated efforts.

Fortunately we also have different stories that emphasize new roles of local CSI and IT-integrators. They are a core category in the national Association of Industrial Automation of Ukraine (APPAU), and the national movement ‘Industry 4.0 in Ukraine’. Integrators are key experts and players in most of APPAU initiatives as the creation of national strategy I4.0, activities of Technical committee 185 ‘Industrial Automation’, creation and deployment of several industry digital roadmaps, regional hi-tech clusters development, innovation programs, launch if Digital Innovation Hubs and so on, In fact, first success stories in local I4.0 are produced together with such integrators, these are projects on pipe manufacturer ‘Interpipe’, machine-builder ‘FED’ and pharmaceutical plan ‘Yuria-Farm’.

Flow of such stories and cases produced but local IT-Enterprise is twice bigger as all western brands working in Ukraine taken together. They also do the biggest Trans4mation forum in Ukraine, which in 2020 got 2000+ attendees during 4 days.

Therefore, this experience leads us to re-thinking roles of CSI & IT-integrators in I4.0 era. They should come out from a role ‘just an integrator (leaded somehow and somewhere by big vendors or big end users)’ and recognize other important leadership roles, that some of them are already doing

  1. Integrators are, in fact, much closer than any other category to the role of national policy makers in local Industry 4.0 policies at the State’s level
  2. Integrators are driving force in market education, implementation of technical standards and innovations
  3. Integrators are core actors in communities development amd clusters building

To what extent this is true for majority of local CSI and if they are really aware themselves about these new roles? How end users and vendors can become more active players of professional communities and how their roles should be changed?

All that are topics of discussion on the forum ‘System integration in Industrial Automation’ we will hold on 13-15th of July in online mode. We will have a set of such discussions between CSI, IT-integrators, vendors and industrial end users. Join us.

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