A new study, from research by the Industrial and Financial Systems, shows double-digit growth of IoT (internet of things) usage in the business operations of industrial companies. 

Executives at respondent companies, ranging from manufacturers to trade contractors and oil and gas companies, are collecting more data from connected devices, integrating it with other systems in new ways, and making IoT more central to their businesses.

More from the study:

• Companies collecting IoT data on entire work cells or production lines rather than individual machine components or individual machines has increased by 17 percent. This enables more advanced use cases, which helps explain a 30 percent increase in use of IoT to support asset performance management.
• Respondents using IoT to monitor their customer equipment saw a 10 percent increase, potentially signaling transformational approaches to field service management.
• Despite these advances, the percentage of respondents who have integrated IoT data streams with their enterprise resource planning (ERP) software hovers at 16 percent. This reluctance may represent a barrier to leveraging IoT to deliver net new business models or revenue opportunities.

“Enterprise IoT integration allows you to take incoming data from connected devices and use it to create business events in ERP,” IFS chief product officer Christian Pedersen explains. “The software can either present that data to humans or act on it as it comes in. Think of the potential for IoT constantly streaming into ERP through the business logic, where artificial intelligence (AI) applications constantly learn and apply that learning by creating new business logic. That is when AI will see the real breakthrough—and when ERP systems will dramatically transform, changing the way we think about them.”

Download and read the complete study at ifsworld.com.