IIC Journal of Innovation 7th Edition | Page 7

I²M²—The Future of Industrial Internet Monetization wiring, mechanical equipment, etc. It does not make sense to pay for such physical components during usage. C HALLENGES AND O PPORTUNITIES There are two main reasons why this type of payment model does not exist today: 1. A typical large industrial system incorporates many thousands of components (physical parts, devices, software) from many hundreds or even thousands of different builders. There is no efficient manual tracking method possible to deliver usage payments to all these providers. Even traditional automatic payment systems do not really help: Using an individual payment method for each component (e.g. based on credit card and serial numbers as with today’s desktop software) would be extremely cumbersome for the operational user. 2. Some of such components are payable upon delivery. This includes physical building parts, electric The first challenge could be solved with a technical standard, which automatically manages the payment for all components at the operational user site by a centralized cloud-based payment processor (see Figure 1). Much like a credit card clearance service, this processor collects the money one time per payment cycle (e.g. one month) from the operational user and distributes it in accordance with the agreed upon price to all the builders of the components and the system builder (as its share for planning, designing and deploying the complete system). The second challenge (cost of physical components) will not be fully eliminated in the future but rather weakened: In recent history the cost of physical components is quite stable for most industrial systems. On Figure 1: An automatic standardized payment system for industrial systems - 6 - March 2018