机械工程平台经济学（英文版）.pdf

Challenges opportunities courses of action Platform Economics in Mechanical Engineering May 2018THE SUCCESS OF PLATFORMS AN EXAMPLE FOR MECHANICAL ENGINEERING TO FOLLOW? Platform companies such as Amazon and Google have changed many B2C markets from the ground up. As they now penetrate the B2B segment, German engineering companies too are joining the fray. Though the correspond- ing ecosystem is still a work in progress, the trend is clear: In the industrial environment too, platform-based appli- cations are becoming the key factor of differentiation. That, however, confronts the corporate sector especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with huge challenges. Further barriers to entry are raised by the complexity and diversity of the platforms currently available and the question marks that still hang over business cases, not to mention the need to acquire complete- ly different knowledge and skill sets compared to the industrys traditional core business. For this study, Germanys Mechanical Engineering Industry Association VDMA, trade fair operator Deutsche Messe and Roland Berger investigated the platform economy in the German mechanical and plant engineering sector. The 15 VDMA members that took part in a series of workshops and discussions include firms of all sizes and at every link in the value chain from midcaps to blue chips, from traditional mechanical and plant engineering companies to providers of factory automation and software solutions. At the time of the study, all these companies had already gained relevant experience with platforms building them, using them or engaging in early-stage operation and each was therefore able to contribute varying perspectives. The workshops focused primarily on the companies platform applications, bringing together and analyzing crucial experience accumulated “by practitioners for practi- tioners“ in order to learn new insights and develop recommendations on how to get the most out of platforms. Building on the questions discussed and the outcomes arrived at by the group, this study addresses the follow- ing aspects: What are digital and IoT platforms, and what does the platform landscape of relevance to mechanical engi- neering look like? What new business models and models for success are there? How can companies position themselves successfully in the platform economy? What obstacles and challenges should be expected? What criteria should be applied when choosing a platform? And just as importantly: How will the platform economy continue to evolve going forward? The study you are reading is the first comprehensive analysis of the structures of platform-based business models in the B2B segment in general and mechanical and plant engineering in particular. As well as making it easy to understand the role played by the platform economy in mechanical engineering, it also provides valuable guidance for business decisions.Platform Economics in Mechanical Engineering 3 SETTING THE SCENE: PLATFORMS TRIUMPHAL MARCH Platform companies rank among the most influential and the most valuable enterprises in the world. The sev- en biggest ones Apple, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Tencent and Alibaba have long since surpassed the value of all the firms listed in the Euro Stoxx 50 (which includes the likes of Allianz, Bayer, Daimler, Sanofi, SAP and Siemens). 01 So, what is their recipe for success? Compared to the tra- ditional market leaders in the market segments they have targeted, platform companies possess revolution- ary core competencies and competitive advantages. In place of physical assets and the associated value creation activities, they devote themselves entirely to the match- making function that brings the supply and demand sides together. Platforms thus operate as intermediaries, using digital technology to forge links between two or more market players. They simplify traditional business interactions between connected participants by han- dling transactions on the platform itself. More than that, they facilitate completely new interactions that would be inconceivable without the platform. Platforms thus add value in three main ways. First, they re- duce transaction costs. That is partly a side-effect of sim- plified interaction via a common technology platform. But it is also partly the result of specific platform ser- vices. Typical transactions include matching supply and demand, providing data and automating the handling of contractual and payment processes. Platforms cut transaction costs by standardizing communication and contractual elements, minimizing the effort involved in coordination and creating a coordinated ecosystem. They also create an ideal environment in which to find the best offerings to meet specific individual needs. The second way in which digital platforms add value is through scale or network effects. Supply and demand stimulate each other, so every extra participant makes the Cover photo: chinaface/iStock The seven biggest B2C platforms compared to the Euro Stoxx 50 Market capitalization of the worlds top seven digital platforms compared to the Euro Stoxx 50 EUR bn Data from January 2018 01: Digital platforms Sources: Bloomberg, Roland Berger Digital platforms Euro Stoxx 50 Apple Alphabet Amazon Facebook Microsoft T encent Alibaba 3,111 3,7324 Platform Economics in Mechanical Engineering platform even more attractive. The more people sign up to AirBnB to offer accommodation, the more people with corresponding demand will consider this platform as an accommodation agent and ultimately book stays via AirB- nB instead of approaching hotels directly. As more and more rooms and beds are successfully brokered, the plat- form in turn becomes more attractive to additional pro- viders of accommodation a self-propagating effect known in the trade as a positive network effect. Depending on their design, platforms also generate very specific customer benefits. To take just one example: They open up the possibility of transactions that would never occur if platforms did not exist or were not used. This circumstance allows them to satisfy hitherto latent, un- serviced and/or completely new customer needs. In oth- er words, a platform provides services based on large volumes of data that are bundled, analyzed and put to Examples of successful B2C platforms Mobility: Whereas a traditional car hire firm like Europcar owns a fleet of around 200,000 vehicles, mobility brokers such as Uber have no vehicles of their own. Instead, they focus exclusively on bringing vehicle owners together with sources of demand for transportation. In 2017, Europcar had a market value of about USD 2 billion against Ubers valu- ation of roughly USD 70 billion. Hospitality: The Hilton hotel chain has something like 800,000 rooms on offer worldwide. Compare that with in- termediary platform AirBnB, which offers no accommoda- tion facilities of its own, but instead matches the supply of beds and rooms in privately owned homes to demand for the same. Hilton had a market capitalization of approx. USD 22 billion in 2017, AirBnB about USD 30 billion. new uses on the platform usually in anonymous form. Data processing capacity, analytical capabilities and the platforms “intelligence“ thus lay the foundation for spe- cific services. It is they that enable certain customer needs to be met in the first place. In so doing, they open the door to additional (digital) services, new business models and operational efficiency gains. After rolling up the B2C segment, a number of estab- lished B2C platforms alongside newcomers to the are- na have for some years also been setting their sights on potential corporate customers. In China, Alibaba has ranked as one of the leading B2B trading hubs since its inception in 1999. US rival Amazon has likewise cast its net wider. In the shape of Amazon Business, it claims to have acquired more than 150,000 customers in Germany alone in its first year, including everything from small businesses and the self-employed to multinational cor- porations and DAX 30 enterprises. Google too is invest- ing on a massive scale to get a foot in the cloud comput- ing door. To this end, the company is building data centers around the globe and snapping up start-ups such as US cloud provider Orbitera and, very recently, software company MobileIron. PLATFORMS IN MECHANICAL AND PLANT ENGINEERING Skeptics argue that you cant compare a heavily seg- mented, indeed fragmented and highly specific industry such as mechanical engineering with the big, wide world of end-customer business that sells books, overnight stays and passenger transport. Nor, they say, do plat- forms command the same importance in this line. That is probably the reason why the market volume addressed by platforms in the B2B environment will indeed never reach B2C-like dimensions. Nor can the scale effects be usefully compared. That said, the disruptive potential of the platform econ- omy has long since been discernible in mechanical en-Platform Economics in Mechanical Engineering 5 gineering too, even if it is still in its early days here. In- terestingly, while the industry as a whole engages in lively debate about the Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, digitalization, predictive maintenance and other assort- ed buzzwords, the many smaller firms in this line in par- ticular remain decidedly critical and/or (still) see plat- forms as comparatively irrelevant to their business. Y et it is important also to see the opportunities and possibil- ities from a customers eye view and to grapple in good time with the nature, scope and possible timing of an entry to plat- form-based business models. In the mechanical and plant engineering sector, two categories of platforms are of general relevance: DIGITAL MARKETPLACES FOR INDUSTRIAL GOODS AND SERVICES. Physical goods from the manufactur- ing industry are offered for sale and transactions are processed on digital marketplaces. Such marketplac- es have been around since the earliest beginnings of the Internet economy. The best-known include Mer- cateo, SAP Ariba, Wucato (a Wrth Group subsidiary) and Zamro, an online shop for tools and technical components. The principal new developments in dig- ital marketplaces are the huge expansion of transac- tion volumes in the B2B segment, the growing num- ber of marketplaces and the marginalization of traditional forms of purchasing especially of C parts and indirect goods.INDUSTRIAL “INTERNET OF THINGS“ PLATFORMS. IoT platforms supply the digital infrastructure and stan- dards needed to connect customers to the cloud. At the same time, they create the chance to use both their own and third-party services in the cloud, to offer these services on an online marketplace and thus to develop new ways of cementing customer loyalty and entirely new business models. This study concentrates on the growing number of IoT platforms that are of relevance to mechanical engineering companies. APPLICATIONS FOR AND CUSTOMER BENEFITS OF IOT PLATFORMS IN MECHANICAL ENGINEERING In conjunction with IoT technology, digital platforms make it possible to interconnect plant and machinery and to harness scale effects in the use of digital ser - vices. The resultant platform landscape and, in conse- quence, the growing number of successful applications will give a powerful boost to the digitalization of me - chanical and plant engineering. Why? Because new services will be cheaper and easier to deploy, and be - cause it will be possible to give customers greater ben- efits more quickly. Market research institution IDC be- lieves that, among the major providers, platform business will already dominate the industry about two years from today, accounting for as much as a third of their income. When debating the value and benefits of the platform economy in the mechanical engineering context, a fun- damental distinction must be drawn between two per- spectives: OEMs perspective as providers of machinery and components on the one hand, and the demand-side or users perspective represented by factory operators on the other. Digital platforms give manufacturers of plant and machin- ery the chance to get to know and understand their cus- tomers far better. For example, analyzing user data clear- ly reveals what demands shape customers everyday routine and how ones offerings can be adapted accord- ingly. Beyond that, providers can draw on their in-depth knowledge of the field in which they work and their inti- mate knowledge of customer and product requirements to develop new digital services, market them via the platform and thereby tap additional revenue streams. Further possibilities are created by the data and infor- mation transparency to which the platform leads, by new forms of collaboration with suppliers and custom- ers, by the reassignment of individual links in the value chain, and by new business models. As in the B2C uni-6 Platform Economics in Mechanical Engineering the customer on a project basis. Scale effects can be re- alized as a consequence. Factory operators benefit above all from digitally based services in the form of specific applications. These gen- erate benefits that were hitherto unthinkable on this scale benefits that depend heavily on the underlying industry segment and the specific application. The range extends from cutting or avoiding costs to possibly increasing revenues to improving the quality of internal processes and products. These opportunities for optimization are in turn rooted in the ability to monitor the condition of plant and machin- ery and of other operating resources in the course of pro- duction. Both status and dynamic data are collected from factory operations in real time. That includes data on the consumption of raw materials and media such as energy, water and compressed air, for example, but also on machine runtimes and downtimes, the unit volumes produced, ambient conditions such as humidity and temperature, aspects of product quality and so on. Moving on to the next step, this condition monitoring can be ramped up into process optimization or plant de- ployment optimization, for instance. By using specific an- alytical methods to aggregate and evaluate the data thus generated, it is possible to control numerous parameters in production and factory operations. Ideally, the algo- rithms used will also be able to draw on data from com- pletely different sources and use this too for the purpose of optimization: data about fluctuations in raw material and energy prices, say, about the traffic situation (espe- cially in relation to logistics and supply chain manage- ment), and about the weather (e.g. in the case of wind turbines). If value-added partners s