Abstract

This IDC Perspective looks into key drivers of and current challenges around data exchange and sharing in manufacturing ecosystems. Sharing and exchanging data in an ecosystem can help manufacturers to improve customer experience, product quality, supply chain efficiency, and product innovation speed. This is because manufacturers cam feed data that will be available from external data sources into their own data analytics applications, enriching their own data sets. Larger volumes of data will enable them to apply data analytics, which will deliver even more insights on how to solve problems and address challenges, as well as more possibilities to detect correlations or dependencies. However, some challenges still need to be addressed to enable and foster data sharing and exchange in manufacturing ecosystems.

"Major challenges around data exchange in manufacturing ecosystems currently relate to a lack of common data formats and concerns related to IP protection and data ownership," said Stefanie Naujoks, research director at IDC Manufacturing Insights. "However, as manufacturing organizations increasingly achieve measurable benefits and ROI from analyzing data, we expect this to increasingly include internal data and data from external sources, namely from the ecosystem."

Coverage