Ricerche di mercato sull'automazione industriale

Cos'è l'Automazione Industriale

L’automazione industriale utilizza robot e sistemi informatici per la gestione di macchine e processi in sostituzione dell’uomo.

Inizialmente, il suo scopo era ridurre i costi relativi ai lavoratori umani. Le aziende lo hanno utilizzato anche per aumentare la produzione. Oggi, però, l’attenzione si è spostata. Le aziende ora lo utilizzano per aiutarle ad adattarsi al cambiamento. Lo stanno utilizzando anche per migliorare la qualità nel processo di produzione.

L'automazione è presente in quasi tutte le fabbriche e i reparti produttivi di oggi. È difficile immaginare una linea di produzione senza di essa. Possiamo dividerlo in tre classi:

1. Fisso: Le aziende spesso utilizzano questo tipo per compiti noiosi. Rende il processo efficiente e migliora i tassi di produttività.
2. Programmabile: questo tipo è ideale per i batch in cui le istruzioni cambiano nel tempo.
3. Flessibile: Con questo tipo l'azienda può anche trasmettere i cambi tramite il sistema di controllo. Pertanto, sono veloci e automatici. Inoltre, non è necessario regolare l'attrezzatura tra un lotto e l'altro.

L'automazione industriale prevede l'utilizzo della tecnologia moderna per guidare l'automazione dei processi e delle operazioni di produzione in ambienti industriali. Si prevede che questo mercato vedrà una crescita considerevole nei prossimi anni, alimentata dalla crescente adozione di progressi tecnologici all’avanguardia come l’intelligenza artificiale (AI), la robotica e l’IoT nei processi industriali.

This means that industrial automation market research is a rapidly expanding area because the tools of this sector are being continuously upgraded, and researchers must implement new strategies to keep pace with the industry, readjusting the approach of market analysts.

Industrial Automation Market Research: How Leading Manufacturers Capture Growth

Industrial automation is entering a phase where competitive position is set by intelligence, not capital. Capex alone no longer separates leaders from followers. The firms gaining share are reading demand signals, supplier shifts, and end-user adoption curves earlier than peers. That is the work of industrial automation market research.

The category now spans far more than PLCs and robotic arms. It includes machine vision, edge compute, predictive maintenance platforms, autonomous mobile robots, digital twins, and AI-driven process optimization. Buyers evaluating these systems run multi-year procurement cycles with cross-functional committees. Vendors who win understand the buying logic at each stage.

Why Industrial Automation Market Research Drives Strategic Advantage

The conventional approach treats automation research as a sizing exercise. Teams commission a TAM study, segment by end-use vertical, and stop there. The output is a deck with growth rates and a vendor map. It rarely changes a roadmap decision.

The better approach treats research as a continuous decision system tied to specific bets: which adjacency to enter, which OEM relationship to deepen, which control architecture to standardize on. Leading firms run installed base analytics alongside total cost of ownership modeling for each platform under consideration. They quantify aftermarket revenue strategy across the asset lifecycle, not just the initial sale.

According to SIS International Research, automation buyers in energy and chemical sectors weight reference installations and field service density more heavily than feature parity when selecting between competing platforms. Brand reputation among plant engineers, built over decades of uptime performance, predicts win rates more reliably than product specifications. That insight reshapes how challenger brands should sequence market entry.

The Buying Committee Behind Capital Equipment Decisions

Automation purchases involve four distinct stakeholder groups. Plant engineers care about reliability and integration with legacy DCS environments. Operations leaders care about throughput and OEE gains. Procurement evaluates supplier qualification audits and bill of materials optimization. Corporate IT increasingly weighs in on cybersecurity posture and data architecture.

Each group reads different sources, attends different conferences, and trusts different voices. Research that surveys only one layer produces incomplete intelligence. B2B expert interviews across all four roles, conducted in sequence, surface the actual decision criteria and the veto points that kill deals late.

Rockwell Automation, Siemens, ABB, Schneider Electric, Emerson, Honeywell, and Yokogawa each occupy distinct positions in this committee map. Strength with one role does not transfer automatically to others. Mapping the gaps is where share is won.

Where the Growth Is Concentrated

Three vectors are pulling capital into automation faster than the broader industrial average. Reshoring feasibility studies are converting into capex commitments across semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and battery manufacturing. Predictive maintenance sizing models show payback windows compressing as sensor and edge compute costs decline. Labor scarcity in food processing, logistics, and metal fabrication is forcing automation onto roadmaps that resisted it for years.

Each vector carries a different research requirement. Reshoring decisions need site selection intelligence and incentive package benchmarking. Predictive maintenance opportunities need installed base analytics by asset class. Labor-driven automation needs workflow-level task analysis to identify which steps can be automated economically.

Source: SIS International Research

What Separates Sharp Competitive Intelligence From Surface Mapping

Most competitive intelligence in this category catalogs product lines and pricing. That is the entry point, not the deliverable. The intelligence that changes commercial outcomes maps three deeper layers: channel economics, integrator relationships, and switching cost structures.

Channel economics determine whether a competitor can sustain price aggression in a given region. System integrators control which platforms get specified on greenfield projects, and their loyalties shift based on margin support and training investment. Switching costs in automation are dominated by engineering time, not equipment write-downs, which means displacement strategies must address engineering hours saved, not unit price.

SIS International’s structured expert interviews with senior automation engineers across North America and Europe consistently show that integrator relationships and field service density predict account retention more strongly than product roadmap quality. Vendors investing in integrator certification programs and regional service depth retain accounts through multi-cycle refreshes.

The SIS Approach to Industrial Automation Market Research

SIS International has conducted automation studies across energy, chemicals, oil and gas, food processing, and discrete manufacturing in more than 135 countries. The work typically combines four components: desk research and market sizing, B2B expert interviews with plant engineers and operations leaders, customer and competitor mapping with installed base analysis, and strategic analysis tied to a named decision.

The output is not a report. It is a position on a specific question: enter or not, acquire or build, standardize on platform A or B, price at premium or parity. SIS International’s proprietary research in industrial automation indicates that buyers narrow consideration sets within the first two vendor conversations, which means messaging and reference architecture must be sharp before the first sales call, not refined during the cycle.

A Framework for Prioritizing Automation Research Investment

Not every decision warrants the same research depth. The framework below sorts automation questions by capital exposure and reversibility, then matches each quadrant to a research intensity.

Source: SIS International Research

The discipline is matching research investment to decision weight. Over-researching reversible decisions burns budget. Under-researching irreversible ones destroys it.

What VP-Level Decision Makers Should Demand From Research

Automation research has value when it reduces uncertainty on a specific bet. The questions that matter at the VP level are concrete. Which segments will reward premium positioning over the next cycle? Where are integrator loyalties shifting? Which legacy installed bases are approaching forced refresh windows? What does the actual decision sequence look like inside a typical buying committee?

Generic market reports cannot answer these. Custom industrial automation market research, grounded in primary interviews with the engineers and operations leaders who write the specifications, can. The firms compounding share in this category are the ones treating research as an operating capability, not a procurement event.

Key Questions

A proposito di SIS Internazionale

SIS Internazionale offre ricerca quantitativa, qualitativa e strategica. Forniamo dati, strumenti, strategie, report e approfondimenti per il processo decisionale. Conduciamo anche interviste, sondaggi, focus group e altri metodi e approcci di ricerca di mercato. Contattaci per il tuo prossimo progetto di ricerca di mercato.