Breaking Through the Top 5 OEM Challenges to Success with Industrial IoT

In today's high-energy Digital Transformation, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) landscape, OEMs face immense pressure to innovate and deliver sophisticated, connected solutions. While the promise of IIoT is absolutely real, there are many tough challenges in building, deploying and maintaining enterprise-class asset performance and optimized operation applications, and to realize the new revenue streams and competitive advantage these solutions bring.

Many OEMs, eager to embrace the value creation IIoT offers, find themselves stalled by high implementation costs and slow time-to-market. This echoes a fundamental conflict in the IIoT ecosystem: the need for highly customized, differentiated applications versus the imperative for affordability and efficiency. IIoT ecosystem offerings such as Low-Code and IoT-as-a-Service (IoTaaS) solutions often fall short, either lacking the necessary flexibility and scalability (Low-Code) or proving prohibitively expensive and with long time-to-market (IoTaaS).

This article delves into the Top 5 Challenges that OEMs encounter when building enterprise-grade IIoT solutions, and how to overcome them. We’ll explore each challenge in detail, illustrate them with real-world examples, and, show how IoT83’s Flex Platform is specifically designed to overcome these hurdles, enabling OEMs to thrive in the age of connected industry.

Challenge 5: Standing Out from the Crowd– Essential Differentiation in the IIoT Era

In a market saturated with "smart" products and connected solutions, simply offering basic connectivity is no longer enough. OEMs must deliver truly unique and complete IIoT solutions to differentiate themselves and capture market share. However, achieving this differentiation presents several obstacles:

• Commoditization of Technology: Basic connectivity and data collection are becoming standard, making it harder to stand out on these features alone.
• Rapid Technological Advancements: The constant influx of new technologies demands continuous innovation to maintain a competitive edge.
• Pressure to Innovate: Customers expect increasingly sophisticated and customized solutions, pushing OEMs to constantly evolve their offerings.
• Limited Resources: R&D investment for continuous innovation can strain resources for many OEMs, particularly given the specialty skills IoT, digital transformation, and AI solutions require.

Example: Imagine an industrial equipment manufacturer who initially offered remote monitoring as their IIoT solution. They quickly realize competitors are offering similar features. To truly differentiate, they need to develop value-added services like predictive maintenance, remote diagnostics, and tailored service packages. This requires deeper data analysis, advanced algorithms, and a platform capable of supporting these complex applications.

How the Flex Platform Resolves This: Basic connectivity, core IIoT features, along with scalability, portability, reliability, and security are inherent to Flex. Using the Flex Catalyst Code and Core Service SDKs and APIs OEMs can move straight a focus of innovation: building unique, differentiated solutions instead of getting bogged down in underlying platform complexities. So with Flex, OEMs can:

• Craft Innovations from their expertise and know-how and deploy on a proven platform.
• Iteratively Build a Competitive Advantage by continually enriching a core solution or by building multiple applications on a portable and multi-tenant foundation.
• Unlock New Revenue Streams based on highly scalable and reliable IIoT applications and innovative service offerings.

Challenge 4: Navigating the Cybersecurity Maze: Protecting Data & Devices

As IIoT adoption grows, so do cybersecurity risks. Protecting sensitive data and ensuring the integrity of IIoT systems is paramount. The expanding attack surface and increasing sophistication of cyber threats create a complex maze for OEMs to navigate:

• Data Breaches and Cyberattacks: IIoT systems handling sensitive data become prime targets for cybercriminals, leading to potential financial losses, reputational damage, and regulatory penalties.
• Multi-Tenancy & Compliance Challenges: Ensuring data privacy across all tenants and adhering to evolving regulations like GDPR and CCPA adds layers of complexity and cost.
• Supply Chain Risks: Vulnerabilities can exist anywhere within the IIoT ecosystem, from edge devices to third-party components, increasing the risk exposure.
• Lack of Visibility: Many OEMs lack comprehensive visibility into their IIoT security posture, making vulnerability identification and remediation difficult.

Real-World Example: The news is rife with examples of cyberattacks on industrial control systems. A successful attack on an OEM's IIoT system could cripple manufacturing plants, disrupt critical infrastructure, compromise product integrity, and result in massive data theft, causing severe financial and operational damage.

‍How the Flex Platform Resolves This: Flex Platform is built with robust, multi-layered security features to mitigate these risks. It incorporates:

• Secure data encryption: Protecting data both in transit and at rest.
• Access controls: Limiting access to sensitive data and systems to authorized personnel.
• Integration with enterprise security systems: Seamlessly integrating with existing security infrastructure for a unified security posture.

By leveraging Flex's inherent security and cybersecurity expertise from IoT83, OEMs can confidently deploy IIoT solutions while minimizing their cybersecurity risks.

Challenge 3: Scalability & Flexibility Bottlenecks: Avoiding Blockers to IIoT Success

Even with powerful functional capabilities, many IIoT deployments stumble as they scale and as business needs evolve. Older generation platforms and point solutions often lack the inherent scalability and adaptability required for long-term IIoT success. This leads to:

• Scalability Limits: As the number of connected devices and data volumes surge, systems can become unstable, experience performance bottlenecks, and even suffer data loss.
• Limited Adaptability: Rigid solutions struggle to accommodate changing business requirements, new technologies, and evolving market demands, leading to costly platform overhauls and missed innovation opportunities.
• Vendor Lock-in: Proprietary platforms can restrict flexibility, hinder integration with other systems, and impede migration to future technologies. Open systems are essential.
• Difficulty Adding Intelligence to Enterprise Systems: Many IIoT solutions struggle to securely integrate and interwork with existing enterprise systems and data silos, limiting the potential for holistic business optimization.

Real-World Example: Consider an OEM whose initial pilot IIoT project is successful. As they attempt to roll it out across national or global customers, their chosen platform buckles under the increased data load and device connectivity. Furthermore, when market feedback necessitates integrating new AI-driven analytics or incorporating data from a newly acquired business unit, their inflexible platform proves incapable of adapting, requiring a costly and time-consuming platform replacement.

‍How the Flex Platform Resolves This: Flex Platform is architected from the ground up for scalability and adaptability. Flex inherently provides:

• Highly scalable architecture: Designed to handle massive data volumes and device connectivity without performance degradation.
• Rich middleware services: Providing pre-built functionalities that simplify complex operations and reduce custom coding.
• Secure API ecosystem: Enabling open system integration, avoiding vendor lock-in and facilitating seamless integration with existing enterprise systems and future technologies.

Flex's scalable and flexible design ensures OEMs can confidently grow their IIoT deployments and adapt to evolving business needs without hitting architectural roadblocks.

Challenge 2: Breaking Down Data Silos: Integrating Business Silo Systems & IIoT Data

A major hurdle for OEMs seeking true enterprise-class IIoT solutions is integrating disparate systems and breaking down data silos. Fragmented data landscapes create inefficiencies, hinder data-driven insights, and limit the overall value of IIoT investments. Key issues include:

• Data Silos: Critical data remains trapped within isolated systems like manufacturing equipment, ERP, CRM, and field service applications.
• Disparate IoT Devices: Integrating data from diverse IIoT devices with varying protocols and data formats creates integration complexities.
• Inconsistent Data Formats and Standards: Differing data formats across systems necessitate time-consuming data transformation and normalization efforts.
• Complex Custom Integrations: Without the right platform, custom integrations can be expensive, error-prone, and slow to develop.
• Limited Interoperability: Legacy systems and point solutions often lack the necessary interoperability for seamless data exchange and collaboration.

Real-World Example: An OEM's manufacturing data resides in one system, customer service data in another, and product design data in a third. Because these systems are siloed, the OEM struggles to connect manufacturing defects to customer complaints, hindering their ability to identify root causes, optimize product design, and proactively address customer service issues. This data fragmentation prevents them from achieving a holistic view of their operations and customer experience.

‍How Flex Platform Resolves This: Flex Platform provides robust integration capabilities and pre-built connectors to seamlessly bridge data silos. It empowers OEMs to:

• Securely connect disparate systems: Integrating data from edge devices, sensors, enterprise systems, and cloud platforms.
• Normalize data: Transforming data from various sources into a consistent format for unified analysis and reporting.
• Break down data silos: Facilitating data sharing and collaboration across departments and functions.

By unifying data from across the enterprise, Flex unlocks the full potential of IIoT, enabling OEMs to gain valuable insights, improve decision-making, and drive business growth.

Challenge 1: High Costs and Slow Time-to-Market for IIoT Projects

Consistently ranked as the top concern for OEMs, the high costs and protracted time-to-market associated with traditional IIoT projects often derail even the most promising initiatives. These roadblocks stem from several factors:

• Custom Development Costs: Building custom IIoT solutions from scratch involves significant upfront investment in application development, device integration, and specialized expertise.
• Lengthy Development Cycles: Historically, IIoT projects can take months or even years to complete, from initial planning to full deployment and ongoing maintenance, delaying ROI and increasing project risk.
• Integration Challenges (compounding costs and timelines): Integrating diverse systems and data sources without an effective platform approach amplifies complexity, time, and cost.
• Talent Shortages: The scarcity and high cost of skilled engineers proficient in IIoT, data science, and cybersecurity further inflate project budgets and timelines.

Real-World Example: An OEM decides to invest in a predictive maintenance solution. Using a traditional approach, they face unexpected integration hurdles, require more specialized engineers than initially budgeted, and encounter significant delays in deployment. The project ultimately exceeds its budget and timeline, jeopardizing its ROI and delaying the realization of its intended benefits. This scenario, unfortunately, is all too common.‍

How Flex Platform Resolves This: Flex Platform directly addresses the cost and time-to-market challenges by providing a comprehensive, pre-built foundation for IIoT solutions. The "Flex Approach" and its 3-layer architecture drastically reduce custom development needs:

• Scalable, reliable, and secure 'Platform Foundation': Providing the essential infrastructure, eliminating the need for OEMs to build it from scratch.
• 35+ Core Services: Offering pre-built functionalities that significantly reduce the 'lines of code' required for custom applications, accelerating development.
• 'Catalyst Code': Including reusable IIoT function templates that OEMs can adapt and customize for sophisticated solutions, further speeding up development.

By minimizing infrastructure overhead and providing pre-built components, Flex enables OEMs to drastically cut costs, accelerate time-to-market, and focus resources on true innovation and differentiation.

The Compounding Effect of "The 5 Challenges"

As we've outlined, each of these five challenges presents a significant hurdle for OEMs venturing into the IIoT space - each on their own. But, the true magnitude of the problem lies not just in each challenge alone, but in their combined and compounding effect. These challenges don't exist in isolation; they intertwine and exacerbate each other, creating a perfect storm that can easily overwhelm even the most determined OEMs.

Imagine an OEM grappling with skyrocketing costs and slow time-to-market. To differentiate themselves in a crowded market, they need to innovate rapidly, further straining already tight resources. Meanwhile, the growing complexity of their IIoT ecosystem magnifies cybersecurity vulnerabilities, demanding even more investment in expertise and protective measures. As their IIoT initiatives scale, they hit scalability and flexibility bottlenecks, realizing their initial platform choices can't keep pace. And throughout this entire process, data silos impede their ability to gain a holistic view of their operations and leverage the very insights that IIoT promises.

This convergence of challenges can feel paralyzing. OEMs find themselves facing a multi-faceted dilemma, struggling to innovate, secure their systems, scale effectively, integrate their data, and control costs - all while under intense pressure to deliver results quickly. Without a powerful and integrated approach to address all of these challenges simultaneously, the promise of IIoT for OEMs risks becoming overshadowed by the overwhelming complexities of its implementation.

It is precisely this confluence of obstacles that underscores the critical need for a fundamentally different approach - an approach embodied by the Flex Platform.

Advantages of the Flex Platform

By overcoming these top 5 challenges, Flex Platform offers OEMs a multitude of advantages, including:

• Reduced Costs: Lower development, integration, and maintenance costs are achieved through several mechanisms inherent in the Flex Platform. Critically, Flex dramatically reduces the number of new lines of code needed for custom application creation. This is a direct result of the Flex Platform's innovative 3-layer architecture, designed to minimize custom coding and maximize reusability.
• Accelerated Time-to-Market: Rapid prototyping, development, and deployment are enabled by the platform’s comprehensive features and streamlined approach, which again are rooted in the efficiency gained from the 3-layer design and reduced coding effort.
• Enhanced Flexibility and Scalability: Future-proof architecture that adapts to evolving business needs and scales to handle massive IIoT deployments, supported by the robust and modular nature of the 3-layer platform.
• Robust Security: Built-in security features and cybersecurity expertise from IoT83, protecting sensitive data and ensuring system integrity, integrated throughout all layers of the platform.
• Seamless Data Integration: Breaking down data silos and unifying data from disparate systems for holistic insights and improved decision-making, facilitated by pre-built connectors and data normalization services within the platform.
• Focus on Innovation: Freeing up engineering resources to concentrate on developing unique, differentiated applications and value-added services, shifting developer focus from infrastructure to higher-level application logic thanks to the foundation provided by Flex.

To further illustrate how the 3-layer architecture speeds development and slashes the volume of “New Lines of Code” solutions require here are additional details:

• Layer 1 – A Scalable, Reliable, and Secure ‘Platform Foundation’: This layer provides the foundational infrastructure – the plumbing and bedrock – for any IIoT solution. By providing this pre-built foundation, Flex eliminates the need for OEMs to write code for core platform functionalities like scalability, security, device connectivity, and data management. This layer handles the heavy lifting "under the hood," saving countless lines of code.
• Layer 2 - 35+ Core Services: This layer offers a rich and well documented library of pre-built, reusable middleware services covering common IIoT functions. Instead of writing code for tasks like data processing, analytics, alerting, rule engines, and API management from scratch, OEMs can simply leverage these existing services. Each service utilized represents a significant reduction in custom coding effort.
• Layer 3 - ‘The Catalyst Code’: This layer provides 'starter code' and templates for common IIoT applications. OEMs can use this 'Catalyst Code' as a starting point, adapting and customizing it for their specific needs, rather than building applications entirely from the ground up. This drastically accelerates development and minimizes new code creation.

A high-level diagram of the Flex 3-Layer solution is provided below:

In essence, the Flex 3-layer Platform shifts the development paradigm. Instead of writing thousands of lines of code for fundamental platform functions, OEMs using Flex can primarily focus on writing the differentiating application logic– the "secret sauce" that makes their solution unique. This is the key to Flex's dramatic reduction in lines of code, faster time-to-market, and lower development costs.

Conclusion

For OEMs navigating the complexities of IIoT implementation, the challenges are real and significant. However, they are not insurmountable. IoT83’s Flex Platform offers a strategic solution, specifically engineered to address these Top 5 Challenges head-on. By embracing the "Flex Approach," OEMs can overcome the traditional barriers of high costs, slow time-to-market, limited flexibility, cybersecurity risks, and data silos. Flex empowers OEMs to unlock the true potential of IIoT, accelerate their digital transformation journey, and establish a sustainable competitive advantage in the increasingly connected industrial world.

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