Chris Turlica is CEO at MaintainX — a workflow coordination, communication and compliance platform for industrial and frontline teams.

Toyota’s Japanese manufacturing plants crank out about 13,500 new vehicles every day—but last year, 14 of them were knocked offline for 24 hours by a single software glitch. In Australia, a Chevron natural gas plant went offline for unplanned repairs, driving up global energy prices. And when plating equipment caught fire at a Renesas semiconductor fab, it took months to restore production, costing the company $156 million per month.

This is the reality of modern manufacturing: industrial facilities are incredibly sophisticated, but they can be knocked offline by a single failure anywhere along the assembly line. Exactly how much money is lost when that happens varies by industry, from $36,000 per hour in the fast moving consumer goods space to an average of $125,000 per hour in the energy and heavy industry sectors. Experts estimate that unplanned downtime costs the world’s biggest companies more than $1.4 trillion per year.

Scheduled maintenance can help to keep plants running smoothly. But to reduce unplanned downtime, we need to go further and join the dots between plant operators and equipment manufacturers. With better communication between these stakeholders—with truly connected manufacturing—we have an opportunity to solve this trillion-dollar problem and radically improve the status quo.

The Power Of Connected Manufacturing

In today’s manufacturing plants, when a motor seizes up, the assembly line comes to a halt. Workers conduct repairs and things work correctly again—until next time. Nobody’s really tracking why the motor broke down or working to understand the root cause of the problem; they’re just responding to breakdowns as they happen.

What if there were a better way? Imagine a world where that motor continuously sends operational data back to the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), giving them visibility into its performance. When the motor starts to run hot, the OEM can proactively alert the plant operator before a major outage occurs. The OEM, after all, has both a deeper technical understanding and a vast pool of performance data, giving them insights that aren’t accessible to individual plant operators.

By consolidating equipment monitoring capabilities, OEMs can accelerate the innovation cycle to develop next-gen equipment with superior performance and reliability. That’s especially important as AI comes to the fore: Only OEMs that can capture and compile real-world performance data will be able to train models and create more intelligent machinery to drive benefits for end-users.

Finally, data sharing fosters a stronger OEM-plant operator partnership focused on value delivery and guaranteed outcomes rather than just transactional equipment sales. Rolls-Royce pioneered this approach with power-by-the-hour for airlines; with better connectivity, it could become the status quo in manufacturing, too. The end result would be a deeper relationship between OEMs and plants—and increased revenues for everyone.

4 Steps To Connected Manufacturing

We already have the technology we need to realize this vision. Most factories are already managed using digital twins, with individual machines reporting their status back to local hubs in real time, so it’s just a question of feeding that data back to OEMs. Simple, right?

Well, not so fast. To implement connected manufacturing, we’ll need to solve four key challenges:

1. Keep it simple.

If every machine were provided by a single OEM, connected manufacturing would be a breeze. The reality, though, is that even something as apparently low-tech as cooking a potato chip can require over half a dozen different machines to mix, roll, slice, reclaim scraps, fry, sort, flavor and package the finished product. The result, inevitably, is a Rube Goldberg assemblage of equipment from many different OEMs.

We can’t expect manufacturers to use dozens of different OEM-provided apps to manage their assembly line. Instead, we need a single unifying layer integrated into the plant’s digital twin to provide interoperability and channel insights from point-of-use to OEM and back again.

2. Keep it private.

For plant operators, operational data is commercially sensitive. Customer relationships are at risk if designs, specs and order details are leaked, while exposing details about plant efficiency or other KPIs can put companies at a disadvantage in the marketplace. The average data breach now costs manufacturers $5.56 million.

Add the increasing regulatory focus on data privacy—driven by Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and state-level U.S. regulations—and it’s clear that data privacy will be a top priority for manufacturers. If there’s any risk of data leaking to outside parties, plant operators will give connected manufacturing the cold shoulder.

3. Keep it secure.

Today’s manufacturing plants—powered by distributed IoT systems and vulnerable to costly shutdowns if a single machine is knocked offline—are prime targets for ransomware attacks. Hackers caused major problems (including full plant shutdowns) at over 500 industrial sites in 2024 alone.

As a result, manufacturers are rightly wary of offering hackers a larger attack surface. To succeed, connected manufacturing needs bulletproof security—ideally using data pipelines that already exist rather than requiring new points of entry into critical industrial equipment.

4. Keep putting the customer first.

Connected manufacturing will only succeed if it drives concrete value for customers. We can’t do what other companies have done, creating connected equipment that limits owners’ ability to conduct repairs or use their machinery flexibly to achieve goals.

Instead, OEMs need to stay relentlessly focused on delivering more value and building stronger relationships with plant operators. Manufacturers should never have to ask what’s in it for them; the added value from connected manufacturing needs to be obvious and unequivocal to win buy-in.

Bridging The Gap

Pitfalls clearly remain as we look to usher in a new era of connected manufacturing. But all these challenges are surmountable—and the potential payoff, for both plant operators and OEMs, is extraordinary.

The manufacturing industry stands at the brink of a transformative shift, with real-time data-sharing redefining the relationship between manufacturers and equipment OEMs. If we can bridge this gap, we have an opportunity to revolutionize manufacturing—increasing resilience and profitability for plant operators of all kinds and enabling OEMs to accelerate innovation and build stronger and more durable relationships with their customers.

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