The Ability to Change Your Mind in the Future

Open IIoT architectures form the foundation of modern digital infrastructures and enable manufacturing companies to easily adapt their core applications to new requirements and market needs due to the flexibility, adaptability and scalability they gain.

Realize Your IIoT-Architecture
to Fully Scale Industrie 4.0

As digitalization has become the main topic for manufacturing companies in the last decade, those companies are witnessing a paradigm change that underlines the need for open and flexible Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) architectures. The wide spreading of sensors, ubiquitous connectivity, and data-driven decision-making are becoming the norm rather than the exception. Industry leaders recognize that addressing these trends requires a fundamental shift in how their digital infrastructures are conceived and implemented.

In parallel, openness has emerged as a guiding principle defining ecosystems' success. The transition from proprietary, closed systems to open, collaborative architectures is crucial for companies to stay competitive and innovative. Open architecture principles, characterized by interoperability, modularity, and vendor neutrality, build the foundation for seamless integration and innovation across the company.

M. Sc.
Jacques Engländer

Senior Consultant
jacques.englaender@onward.partners
+49 241 412522-62

Are you ready to change your mind ?

Learn more about our Initial Co-Creation Workshop to Analyze Your IIoT-Architecture Potential

  • By identifying your architecture’s potential in the digitalization of your company and creating an environment for blending external input, internal knowledge sharing and guided co-creation sessions you will gain an understanding of the benefit of an architecture realization project.

    Furthermore, you will get insights regarding strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of your actual architecture as well as recommendations for action on possible next steps.

  • Approx. 2-week schedule with preparation, on-site co-creation workshop and debriefing.

    Followed by setting up an individual realization project of your open IIoT architecture.

  • Target group: Transformation & digitalization managers or groups, being responsible for smart factories and enterprise architecture.

    Further participants: Global and local stakeholders of the digitalization program (CDO / CIO, digitalization lead, …)

Get in touch with our experts and request an individual proposal

Design and build your architecture based on open principles and industry-proven blueprints

  • Today, manufacturing companies often suffer from a lack of interoperability among various entities from both the shop and business floor due to their current architecture. Ensuring seamless communication and data exchange between legacy systems and newer applications to master heterogeneity requires an approach realizing a loose coupling of systems with openness.

  • Developing open architectures in IIoT environments means radically throwing old concepts and habits overboard. Therefore, an architecture development must always rely on business objectives to point towards the operational sweet spot. The architectural guidelines linked to those objectives bring in your company’s individuality.

  • Architecture development and its successful implementation fail by limiting to a top-down approach. Likewise, a bottom-up perspective won´t align the architecture with the business objectives. Therefore, scalability is leveraged by merging a top-down and a bottom-up perspective for development and long-term operation.

  • Core branches primarily building on IT such as finance or software organizations have had decades to derive best practices. OT-minded manufacturing companies can use these best practices and adapt them to their specific needs. Architectural and industry-proven blueprints help to reduce effort for development and increase suitability at the same time.

This Whitepaper is dedicated to presenting the significance of open IIoT architectures. By examining the core principles that define openness, case studies from real example solutions, and expert insights, we will explain and show the wide-ranging ways open IIoT architectures drive sustainable innovation, elevate business value, and secure the future of your business. Learn more

Where we support our clients

“When it comes to realizing a company-wide and manageable IIoT-Architecture,
do not only consider technology but also your people and culture.” 

Senior architects design and develop IIoT-Architectures with a variety of tools and methods due to the process's complexity. Ranging from generic and easily adoptable golden rules to comprehensive and sophisticated frameworks, the real development process often lacks profound business digitalization alignment and scaleable roll-out concepts. By considering these aspects, we bring people from different departments together - process experts, engineers, automation specialists, developers, project managers and decision makers.

In our client projects, we rely on a stepwise approach with three main phases:

  • Why should I realize an IIoT architecture to enable innovation?”

  • How can I set guidelines through open architecture modeling?”

  • What do I need to consider and specify in my architectural blueprint?”

  • Who is going to deliver technologies and systems and will integrate my architecture?”

  • When is the right moment to start implementation and ongoing training?”

You want us to support your IIoT-Architecture realization?

Client Cases