IT/OT integration – investment drivers depend on many factors

Nowadays, the topic of IT/OT integration has gained a lot of traction, in particular in manufacturing. However, we believe that IT/OT integration is not equally relevant in all the various manufacturing sub-sectors. In fact, the relevance of IT/OT integration differs quite a lot depending on what sub-sector we are looking at and is determined by many factors, such as:

• Level of production automation
• Production type (mass vs. individual production)
• Number of product variants
• Negative impact of production stand-still
• Need to increase efficiency of shop-floor operations
• Need to better align with customer expectations and market demand

The more of these factors are concerned, the higher the overall relevance of IT/OT integration.

In a recently published report, we look into the relevance of IT/OT integration in various manufacturing sub-sectors and give an outlook on investment drivers for IT/OT integration.

In the report “IT/OT Integration in Manufacturing – Use Cases, Relevance, and Provider Landscape”, we also give several concrete project examples (e.g. Dow Chemical, Baker Hughes, Severstal, Lundin, and Abbott Nutrition), which we have clustered into 3 major IT/OT integration use cases.

Moreover, we give an overview of the provider landscape for IT/OT integration, which is manifold and comprises a lot of different domains and areas of expertise, such as C&SI services, security, connectivity, edge computing, and IoT platforms, to mention but a few.