What explains the underinvestment in industrial software

Mention ‘industrial software’ to even those in the global techno-capitalist complex, and you will hear something about ERP, IoT, and the supposed miracles drones will bring about. These are all relevant. But do not come close to the core of industrial software, which is how maintenance work might be brought under the purview of software. 

We think it is down to two things. First, industrial work is unfamiliar to the white-collar workers who make software. The product managers, software engineers, architects are physically and culturally distant from the reliability engineers and turnaround managers. The latter’s needs simply don’t reach the former. The marketing team, or insurance agents might be just one Facebook friend request or a few cubicles away. But the plant is worlds away.  

Second, the nature of manufacturing is such that the managerial cohort cannot mandate strict data sharing to the working cohort for no immediate benefit to the workers themselves but for the higher purpose of better decision making by the cohort of managers. The worker in manufacturing is oftentimes on a scaffold 40 feet above ground, operating a valve, wearing a harness. The worker, literally, has both hands full. The worker is also working a 12-hour shift, and if the managerial cohort mandates a full field report after the shift, the results are often unusable. The theatre of industrial operations isn’t like a sales floor with a gong where the sales leaders can demand CRM data hygiene stays top notch, while the pipeline remains full.  

Therefore, anybody designing and developing software for the industrial worker might work towards the following:  

• The software must be so well populated with data that the first user should see immediate value in using the tool. With industrial software, the ‘train 100 people for three months’ approach to making the software valuable doesn’t really work.  

• The software must be extraordinarily easy to use.  

• The UX must consider the physical circumstances of the field worker – both hands full, mobile device only, attention focused primarily on the job and safety.  

The above is a tall order. And some of it simply wasn’t possible at scale until the recent democratisation of AI. We think it’s this unalterable fact of industrial software that has kept this potentially large market limited thus far.  

It can change.  

The line of thinking we consider unreasonable is the idea that industry is somehow inherently, and immutably conservative on the issue of technology adoption. Well, it was said about retail as well. The rise of e-commerce and the consumerization of tech. When circumstances changed, retail did. Industry will too. 

We explore the two impediments to a larger industrial software market in two articles.  

Software people don’t understand manufacturing 

Industrial software must focus on the end user, not the corporate check writer.  

Software people don’t understand manufacturing  

It began in the last few decades of the 20th century. The university system, all across the world, started graduating fewer electrical, mechanical, and chemical engineers. Alongside the decline came the rise of computer engineers. In its early days, programming or coding wasn’t thought to be in the realm of engineering. But programming came to be considered a branch of engineering as mere writing of procedural code gave way to abstractions, Object-oriented programming, systems thinking, and the idea that those working with bits and bytes were building things of scale that’d last, just like their counterparts working with atoms.  

In the early years, the craft of programming was also tied to manufacturing sectors such as aerospace and defence. This gave way to banking and financial services becoming the dominant consumer of software engineering services. Then came the iPhone, the consumerization wave, the explosion of e-commerce, the profusion of enterprise collaboration, the primacy of front-end engineering all cultural ties between software engineering and the traditional engineering disciplines were severed.  

It naturally became much easier for tech founders to dive deep into a challenge desk workers faced, however minor, than attempt to solve a problem in an industry they weren’t exposed to.  

This might change, however, as AI destroys entry level coding jobs, particularly in front-end engineering and as reshoring becomes a theme in several high-income nations. 

Some of the STEM talent is indeed moving into manufacturing. Also, a quarter century of tech primacy has led to a large contingent of Silicon Valley millionaires. A section of this elite cohort is now bringing its smarts, systems thinking orientation, and – above all – software engineering skills to manufacturing. This bodes well for the ‘undesked’ industrial worker 

Then there is reshoring. High-income jurisdictions tend to have high labor costs and stringent regulations pertaining to worker safety. These require smart tooling. This too bodes well for the ‘undesked’.  

We now turn to the final question in this series, which is – the innate challenges of building software for the ‘undesked’ industrial worker.