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Doing what we do at Maximl, we often come across prospects in the industrial software ecosystem with complaints about incumbent vendors. The stated challenges (stated by users, buyers, and partners) span an entire spectrum, from issues of UX to the nature of the vendor landscape.
Industrial software user complaint #1: Inflexibility – of software architecture and vendor company culture
‘One size fits all’ – doesn’t work in enterprise software. It doesn’t work at all in enterprise software.
A critical element of operating any kind of manufacturing business is dealing with heterogeneity. There’s much difference in assets and SoPs across industries, sub-sectors, locations, and jurisdictions – even within an industry. Two cement plants within the same country can be different in a way two retail banks are not.
In fact, there are variations within a single company. No two plants are alike, even two plants that are part of a single legal entity.
Example: The Reality of Industrial Heterogeneity,
As noted, two cement plants within the same country or even the same company can operate completely differently. Variations in plant layout, legacy equipment, shift patterns, and safety cultures create a unique operational fingerprint for every site.
The Cross-Industry Contrast This heterogeneity becomes even starker across different sectors:
- Heavy Metallurgy (e.g., large copper company): Prioritizes turnaround execution speed, complex energy isolation, and managing large contractor pools in high-hazard environments.
- Pharmaceuticals: Demands multi-step quality sign-offs, sterile environment controls, and rigorous, documentation-heavy audit trails.
Why rigid software fails because the operating context is always different, forcing these diverse realities into one rigid Control of Work (COW) process rarely works. It inevitably leads to user friction, unsafe workarounds, and a reversion to manual spreadsheets.
The Solution – A configurable core: The practical answer is a single, flexible platform utilizing a shared core engine. By leveraging configurable rules, workflows, and site-specific tenant environments, organizations can map the exact permit flows and safety gates required for each specific plant delivering a perfect operational fit without rebuilding the software from scratch.
21st century heavy industry (oil refineries, petrochemical plants, power generators, and metal smelters) is maddeningly complex. Variations across thousands of assets, variation in feedstock, variation in required product specs, variation in regulations that the plant must abide by – all add up to a high innate complexity.
This complexity necessitates a process that is adaptable. And the processes cannot be adaptable if the software underpinning the process isn’t.
This requires industrial software to be adaptable by design – a system of rules and workflows. And configurable UX. If industrial software is built without these controls as a core architectural principle, it’ll struggle to adapt to the ways of a specific plant.
And, when software (be it EAM, EHS, PSM, or CoW) fails to adapt to a plant’s processes two things happen. Front line workers revert to what they had been using (email, spreadsheets, group chat, even paper). The software platform in question becomes the site of formal documentation. Real work happens elsewhere.
In addition, every change request becomes an IT project. This is expensive. What’s worse – it slows down change. Software becomes the rate determining step. Production, quality, reliability, and safety challenges compound.
Flexibility issues also stem from organizational culture on the vendor side. Heavy industry is regulated. The regulatory landscape is complex. There are variations stemming from multiplicity of jurisdictions (federal, local, municipal) and norms that apply to specific sub-sectors and industry bodies. An unwillingness to accommodate such variants lead to expensive custom work.
Industrial software user complaint #2: software is built for buyers, not users
As with most other enterprise software categories, industrial software is bought by those in the offices of the CIO, CDO, and functional heads. The functional heads in the heavy engineering sectors are those leading asset reliability, maintenance, production, safety, compliance, and quality.
This is selection by committee. The committee might select a list of features that don’t map to a real workflow at the plant. The list of features might not map to what a single plant worker asked for. Or needs.
This is a problem afflicting all enterprise software, not just industrial software. But enterprise software for white collar workers went through a period in the 2010s when UX, and bottom up, user-centric adoption through the freemium model. This had a positive effect on the entire ‘white collar B2B software’ industry. UX improved across the board.
Industrial software has had no such transformation. Things remain very much in the selection by committee mode.
Prospects report a bad user experience unsuitable for industrial workers – generally speaking. The problem is less about the availability of software and more about the market lacking software that sees actual field use.
Industrial software user complaint #3: Fragmented experiences for buyers and users
Portfolios in the EA, EHS, EHSQ, PSM, and CoW markets have been built through acquisitions.
In the technology industry, post-acquisition integration is a challenge, even for enterprise software companies that have pursued an acquisition-heavy growth strategy for decades. A worrying percentage of acquisitions fail.
The challenge encompasses retention of key personnel, a merger of cultures, and sometimes two different software architectures and user experiences.
This shows up in our industry in the form of user complaints about broken workflows, clunky transitions from module to module (particularly for tasks spanning multiple modules of diverse provenance), bad UX, bad customer service, and confusing signals on product roadmap.
In the industrial software industry, the common problem of post-acquisition integration is exacerbated by high levels of private equity ownership.
The prime mover behind many a acquisition is a PE firm bringing two portfolio companies together. These are naturally driven by an eye on monetizing the installed base better and cross sales. This often bodes well for the shareholders – less so for the customers and users.
Industrial software user complaint #4: Vendors that don’t keep up with the times
Change is slow in heavy engineering.
One consequence of the above is that the software undergirding plant operations (EAM, PSM, ESH, ESHQ, CoW) is often old. The plant runs on a version that hasn’t kept pace with the fast-evolving ecosystem of software development platforms, architecture norms, UX paradigms, and user expectations.
Many vendors in our industry offer software that has been in the maintenance mode for years. There hasn’t been much product leadership. Roadmaps have been weak, the innovation pipeline non-existent.
AI has the potential to address issues long considered intractable. One such issue is getting information out of unstructured sources such as PFDs and P&IDs. This is where computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) technologies come into play.
A second area is the quality of data entered into the ERP platform. At many a plant the plant worker uses non-standard terms, which makes the data unusable, and the act of data entry achieves little either for the plant worker or the plant management beyond checking a box.
This is not a comment on the plant worker. Floor work is hard, high quality data entry shouldn’t be. NLP has advanced to a point where an entry can be considered contextually and given a form that conforms to the standard. That this isn’t common in industrial software in 2006 says something about the tolerance for legacy in our sector.
Such use cases of AI abound. Beyond the sub-sector of industrial AI vendors (whose entire purpose is AI and the curation of in-context industrial data) there’s little use of AI… in EAM, PSM, ESH, ESHQ, and CoW. This needs to change.
Recommendations: the road ahead
Find a vendor with the last mover advantage. Once a software vendor is in business with a large installed base, it’s hard to change. It’s almost impossible to start over, in terms of the product core. The vendor’s start date matters. Those born in the digital age began their journey with knowledge of user challenges in industrial software. There’d be a much higher chance of better built-in configurability and a modern approach to software. Therefore, prioritize younger vendors.
