The 2023 edition of Microsoft’s Digital Operations Signals from the Industrial Internet of Things returns to the age-old debate on buy vs. build. The 80 plus page publication includes the results from a survey of 300 decision makers in companies that have successfully implemented IIoT projects. While the companies are predominantly in manufacturing there is some oil company involvement, notably an unnamed US-based company that operates liquid bulk terminals for the oil and gas and chemicals sector. In 2018, the company embarked on an IoT project and deployed new hardware and software for terminal workflows including product receipts, gate access monitoring and remote control.
After ten months of building the business case and six months of weighing the ‘buy vs. build’ options, the company ultimately decided to buy a solution in the marketplace. The company instead focused on workflows and alarms and notifications. The project manager estimated that the ‘buy’ approach allowed the company to break even approximately three to four times faster than an in-house developed solution.
Microsoft concludes that ‘buy solutions seem to be a reliable choice for users, with 70% of them reporting that their project met their expectations’. Also, payback time is much shorter, 12 months compared to 20 for other approaches. Finally, buy can be cheap, ‘only 3% of respondents reported budget constraints when using the buy approach.
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