WHY WE ARE HERE

Industry Corps exists to help manufacturing firms identify and deploy effective technology, while minimizing the complexity, cost, and time investment required.

Most manufacturing and industrial firms have only scratched the surface of achievable benefits with smart technology (widely referred to as Industry 4.0 or the Industrial Internet of Things). When explaining the slow adoption of new tech, Industry analysts seem to miss the point.

Easy-to-use, affordable technology has proliferated in the 21st century, offering enormous potential for manufacturers to widen their profit margins and make plants safer. Unfortunately, the administrative burden on organizations trying to harness 21st century technology can be surprisingly heavy, and countervail the initial appeal.

To research, evaluate, select, deploy, integrate, and succeed with smart technology requires effort which is vastly under-appreciated. Lean firms can hardly expect their busy managers to employ and sustain exploratory technology projects, which typically require interdisciplinary skills and ongoing attention to minutia. Instead, firms default to passively attending vendor sales pitches, buying when they are sufficiently compelling, and take a “wait and see” approach to scaling.

So many advertisements featuring “IIoT” or “Industry 4.0” monikers portray images of futuristic, ultra-high-tech factories (which always seem to feature holograms and apparently cyborg workers). This fiction bears little resemblance today’s reality, where only 16% of manufacturing firms have reported making ANY substantial progress on Industry 4.0 initiatives. The blame for slow adoption is miscast on either the manufacturers for being too change-averse, or on vendors for missing the mark with products.

Industry Corps believes the primary flaw is NOT the products themselves, but largely the outdated sales and support models used to deliver them. With so many vendors making so much similar sounding noise, separating promising signals from static is becoming near impossible for manufacturers and industrials in general. They make aggressive promises to potential customers, but not nearly as aggressive as their promises to shareholders regarding sales volumes and growth.

Because sales quotas drive so much of industrial technology vendors’ behavior, manufacturing firms struggle to surface advice and recommendations that are both honest and informed. On the services side, billable hours drive behavior, offering little incentive for system integrators to optimize for speed and simplicity. As a result, projects become much more complicated and costly than they need to be.

Luckily, advances in smart technology have allowed us to flip the business model, and finally deliver solutions which stand up to operational and economic reality well past the pilot phase.

Industry Corps is a dedicated technology partner which researches and tests products and configurations to determine the best solutions for individual use cases. We then partner non-exclusively with OEMs to furnish best-possible solutions for top manufacturing challenges, while obsessing over usability, security, system-wide compatibility, and interoperability. We minimize complexity by letting the customer’s problem dictate the technology solution, instead of forcing our favored solution to fit the problem.