German medium-sized companies do not lack data: 73% of industrial small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) use plants, machinery and equipment that provide data to the manufacturer. And just as many equip at least some of the products delivered to their customers to ensure that the most important operating data is available. What is missing, however, are opportunities to evaluate and interpret such data: More than half of respondents rate the required know-how of their employees as moderate or insufficient; on the other hand, fewer than half describe their technical equipment as good to very good for such analysis. For the study, the financier Creditshelf surveyed 187 financial decision-makers from medium-sized industrial companies in July of this year.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA) come to similar conclusions . In terms of production data, expert Jonas Gutjahr thus voices the following criticism: "Most companies do not even read it out. If they do, it usually ends up in Excel spreadsheets or on a server in the basement." That is why the Fraunhofer IPA thus recently presented the InsideOut tool for the context-related visualization of machine data. Companies willing to volunteer for practical testing are now needed.