As business across many industries struggle with supply chain disruptions, rising energy costs, talent constraints, and pressure to improve sustainability metrics, achieving operational excellence and resilience continues to be challenging. According to results in IDC’s recent Worldwide Future of Operations Survey, only about half of survey respondents saw improvement in operations over the past two years. In last year’s survey, 70% of respondents reported improvement.
Recognizing the need for new approaches and new technologies, IDC has developed the Data-Driven Operations (DDO) framework and maturity model. It helps organizations benchmark themselves and develop plans to improve operational performance across multiple dimensions – efficiency, productivity, quality, safety, reliability, and sustainability.
Becoming a data-driven organization is a journey that requires an honest assessment of current state and a willingness to embrace the changes necessary to improve operational performance.
The next five years will be transformational for operations as organizations find new and more effective ways to manage, analyze, and collaborate around their operational data. The impacts will extend beyond the data, impacting how decisions are made and who makes them. It will also impact which roles are needed, who fills those roles, and how organizations manage their operations.
The following 10 predictions delve in into some of the coming changes. From resources and talent to emerging technologies to the increased emphasis on sustainability, IDC predictions explores the implications and the timeline of major aspects of DDO.
Top 10 Predictions: Future of Operations
- Prediction 1: By 2025, 50% of G2000 industrial organizations will make real-time decisions balancing economic and sustainability metrics, simultaneously improving both sets of metrics by 5% across the enterprise.
- Prediction 2: By 2026, 40% of product-centric organizations will use digital tools to measure life-cycle carbon footprint, creating demand for better integration between PLM and operational data.
- Prediction 3: By 2023, talent shortages and pressure to improve operational performance will force organizations to reevaluate their approach to digital transformation, resulting in greater use of outside services.
- Prediction 4: By 2027, the use of extended reality technology, including AR/VR/MR tools, will increase by 40%, creating a new breed of digital worker and reducing operator/field worker errors by 30%.
- Prediction 5: By 2026, the use of robots in nontraditional sectors, most notably remote inspection and maintenance, will increase by 35%, resulting in a 50% drop in inspection errors.
- Prediction 6: By 2023, digital-first operations enabled by 5G connectivity will improve worker safety, resulting in a 20% reduction in lost time accidents.
- Prediction 7: By 2027, 50% of remote operations will use satellite-enabled AI/ML technology to collect and analyze data at the edge, reducing costs and improving yields and energy usage in the natural resource sectors.
- Prediction 8: By 2024, the cloud will surpass on-premises infrastructure as the primary location where operational data is stored, managed, and analyzed for 50% of G2000 organizations.
- Prediction 9: By 2024, 30% of industrial organizations will have become leaner and more agile than their competitors as a result of making real-time operational insights available anytime, anywhere, to anyone.
- Prediction 10: By 2025, 50% of organizations will increase the use of IoT and OT cybersecurity solutions at the edge, cutting OT cybersecurity breaches in half.
Interested in learning more? Watch our on-demand webinar, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Operations 2023 Predictions.
