Importance of Data Sharing for Resilient Industries
Production and manufacturing industries worldwide are continuously harnessing new technologies, particularly digital technologies, to ensure higher productivity and reduce product costs. Currently, these industries produce a tremendous amount of valuable data, mostly kept in-house. Those are sometimes termed data silos. However, by sharing and exchanging those data in a supply or product value chain, manufacturers can perceive greater product quality and user experiences. From the insights of the shared data, industries can perform efficient supply chain execution and better production operations and faster and improved product innovation than by analyzing only their data. Therefore, sharing data between each link in the supply chain (SC) would be a major indicator of the performance and competitiveness of the industries in future. The World Economic Forum, in its recent project “Unlocking Value in Manufacturing through Data Sharing”[1] also recognizes this “by collaborating in data ecosystems; manufacturers can address business needs that they cannot address alone”.
Barriers to Data Sharing in Different Industrial Domains
Unfortunately, sharing data in larger industrial ecosystems, such as in the automobile or aviation industries, has not been widely accepted due to the limited trust among those industries. Industries still believe that it could jeopardize confidential business information and trade secrets. Another major reason companies are reluctant to adopt data-sharing models is the perceived** lack of controllability** of those data. Identifying enough value to justify investment can also be an obstacle. Some organizations have difficulty breaking out of existing thinking patterns, while others lack the capabilities to run the structured assessment needed to drive engagement in data ecosystems.
Even software and data management systems utilized by different industries create data silos unwillingly. Many legacy systems were not designed to share information easily. Each solution stores and manages data in different ways — these are often proprietary to the vendor that created the solution, which makes it hard to share data sets with stakeholders in another department.
Steps to be Initiated to Facilitate the Data Sharing
Three steps can be taken to accelerate data sharing among the industry domains. Firstly, the benefits of data sharing should be visualized across industries. Different stakeholders could share the data and collaborate with each other for their mutual benefits, such as business marketing, matchmaking, demand-supply matching, co-creation of new products and so on. Data platforms with collaborative spaces will play an important role in fostering data sharing. Different collaborative tools and services can be offered based on advanced analytics,** AI, and other emerging digital technologies** to improve the productivity of the industries as a whole. Some collaborative tools related to track and trace and product identity are in the market with limited usage due to a lack of data sets. We will expect more collaborative tools in the future with a higher level of data-sharing provisions.
Secondly, the data-sharing platform should be** trustworthy**. In order to build trust among the actors of the value chains, blockchain technology could be a viable solution. Data owners should have full control of their data with the underlying DLT (blockchain) based architecture, the self-sovereign identity, and IP mechanisms while sharing the data.
Thirdly, data can only be shared if it can be easily** interpreted **and quickly integrated with other data sources. Interoperability of data in different domains is crucial, data should follow specific standards and common guidelines. Thus, a common language or ontology that all parties agree on is required. Most available ontologies in the industrial domain were developed in an ad hoc basis, and most of those initiatives did not gain traction and fails to drive interoperability across the industry.
Finally, by highlighting the benefits of data sharing and taking necessary steps, industries can enhance their productivity, implement new business models and improve capabilities and eventually build a resilient industry.
Our Contribution to Data Sharing for Resilient Industries
At Technovative Solutions, we are developing a cross-industry collaborative data-sharing platform powered by an environment analytical tool, material passport, and circulatory calculator, preliminary used for the recycling materials in automotive, wind turbine and composite materials industries. For more information, please visit JIDEP: Joint Industry Data Exchange Platform
[1] World Economic Forum, “Unlocking Value in Manufacturing through Data Sharing,” [Online]. Available: https://www.weforum.org/projects/data-sharing-for-manufacturing.