Josh Matthews is a Senior Research Analyst at HFS Research, based in Cambridge following a Master’s programme covering Engineering Management at Cambridge University’s Institute for Manufacturing (IfM). His research tackled operational and environmental improvements in industry, and the implementation and management of sustainable initiatives. On behalf of the university, Josh worked on consulting projects with Unilever, as well as SMEs in the tech and marketing spaces.
Josh had previously graduated from Loughborough University with a first-class master’s in Chemical Engineering; over the course of this degree he spent a year at Total in the oil refining industry, and a semester at UC Santa Barbara, publishing work which is currently being commercialised on low-CO2 hydrogen production.
Josh is a keen cricketer, former competitive swimmer, and dabbles in racket sports… while also being partial to a Sipsmith perfect serve and most things edible.
COVID has devastated supply chains. In our August 2020 survey of 400 executives across global 2000 enterprises, supplier availability was cited as the pandemic’s most significant impact. So, it’s little wonder that businesses are going all-in to regain control, and...
In 2019, two years after DXC Technology was formed by the merger of CSC and the Enterprise Services business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, it went for the big-ticket acquisition of Luxoft - boosting its end-to-end digital transformation and engineering capabilities...
HFS recently published an article on how acquisitions can be a tool for augmenting capability and delivering Industry 4.0 services. We discussed that Accenture is pursuing a ruthless acquisition strategy to augment its Industry X.0 practice capability. We also published...
The advent of the internet of things (IoT) meant enterprises and public sector authorities were keen to monitor their whole landscape, including assets, people, and processes, and gain insights into the same. The IoT’s continuing expansion now means an increasing...
Industry 4.0 means a lot of things to a lot of different people. The most consistent and cohesive narrative from our conversations with providers and their industrial clients is that Industry 4.0 is a strategy, roadmap, and mindset; it can...
COVID-19 demands a new level of data gathering and management; most experts agree that contact tracing built on mass testing and vaccination will be the backbone of any exit strategy. While new tracking apps and emerging technologies like blockchain are...
Musings from EY’s 2020 Virtual Blockchain Summit Blockchain promises “creative destruction” through disintermediation, but that is a long-term vision; only 6% of executives we surveyed are leveraging blockchain to remove the need for intermediaries (see Exhibit 1). Enterprise clients...
Providers we’re speaking to during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis are united in the view that their clients will press pause on their Industry 4.0 roadmaps—with only the bare minimum adoption of emerging technologies like the internet of things (IoT), augmented...
Three intertwined technologies—the internet of things (IoT), 5G, and edge computing—are all about to see a massive stall in spending, according to fresh HFS Research data from major enterprises dealing with COVID-19 (see Exhibit 1). But some enterprises covered in...
The automotive sector is as complex as it is competitive, dominated by giant companies trying to wrestle market share away from their competitors. One way that leading brands are differentiating is by embedding more technologies into vehicles to bring new...
Our Industry 4.0 Services Top 10 report found service providers’ 3D printing solutions generally lacking maturity. Some were mature, but many were still developing their capability; until now, that wasn’t necessarily a mistake, because the technology is rapidly developing. COVID-19,...
Consumers are increasingly holding businesses accountable for their whole value chains—from emissions and business disruption to the alarming rise of modern slavery. Every year, more than 9 million people enter a modern slavery industry that profits approximately $150 billion, having...
Project teams, and the leaders who are building them and the surrounding talent pools, must reaffirm whether they’re asking the right questions for service design and design thinking. Are they really considering the end user, and are they considering...
Historically, the oil and gas industry has responded to oil price peaks by spending capital to boost production, while responding to troughs by withdrawing capital and slashing operating costs. Facing COVID-19, a Saudi-Russian price war, and a systemic move away...
COVID-19 has brought with it an undeniable need for action and for humanity to be at its best. But many are also worrying about COVID-19’s effect on the world’s capacity for addressing climate change, both in the near- and long-term....
Manufacturers must get the basics of process optimization right before going down the investment rabbit hole on emerging technologies such as AI or analytics. As these technologies start to facilitate predictive maintenance, supply chain analytics, and new revenue streams, manufacturing...
Service providers to the oil and gas sector have already been shifting to outcome-based models. The new uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 and the oil-price crash means they must double-down. Historically, uncertainty about investments has been a barrier to adopting emerging technology...
The automotive sector is changing: electric cars, autonomous cars, and digital in-car experiences. The industry’s historical precedent of slow development cycles and painful negotiations with suppliers of both products and services, can’t continue. Automotive firms want their partners to act...
The first step for all business leaders looking to futureproof their operations against the climate change risk is engaging with the right partners—across enterprises, academia, policymaking, service providers, education, and civil society—and better-communicating what business metrics and timeframes they care...
Many investors still make excuses for not moving toward sustainable endeavors, often citing the uncertainty surrounding the technology, policies, and environments required to transform. While some established giants and newcomers in the banking and financial services (BFS) sector, like HSBC...
Service providers digitally transforming a sport is a common press release headline, but the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament has yet to see any real attention from providers, despite a $7 billion (and growing) annual revenue and a 2.5...
Industrial customers (in manufacturing, energy, utilities, and so on) have been sharing with us the experiences and challenges of their major IT projects and interactions with service providers. was particularly clear on that front) throughout their engagements: OT expertise...
In January 2020, HFS predicted that the sustainability services space would boom in anticipation of the demand leading up to and following a critical COP26, the UN’s next climate summit (Glasgow, November 2020), given the abject failure of COP25 (Madrid,...
As Concentrix pushes its position in the market for manufacturing sales, marketing, and aftermarket services, it will face not only competing executive priorities for cost and customer experience but also many established competitors. Manufacturing providers must ensure that they’re clear...
Oil and gas (or “energy,” as they’d prefer these days) executives are constrained by inconsistent data quality and an inability to fully utilize their best data. Along with industry-wide fear around sharing data and losing competitive advantage under margin pressures, these constraints weigh heavily on the shoulders of the industry’s leaders, who must take the first step to share their data with...
In climate crisis discussions, water is quickly becoming as relevant as carbon emissions and energy consumption. The 2018 Day Zero crisis in Cape Town—when water simply ran out for the whole city—is a prime example; local industry had “met” its water targets, suggesting those targets were way off the mark in the...
A range of applications for the internet of things (IoT) in the insurance sector includes developing usage-based pricing models, precise and dynamic risk assessment, and new process efficiencies; crucially, insurance firms’ goals match these applications. Despite this, service providers are...
IBM has spent a lot of time and money working on traceability in supply chains recently - citing examples that include fully traceable olive oil production, and building more transparent and collaborative connections between farmers, consumers, and the whole value chain. Supply chain managers now have more options on the table to meet the traceability and...
Utility executives must ensure that customer experience (CX) isn’t just a token “focus”—it’s largely ignored in HFS’ most recent data against a greater desire to cut costs and improve both top and bottom lines. Utility industry firms must engrain its...
The rollout of smart energy meters will go a long way to addressing the difficult balance between renewable energy (RE) production and demand, as more and more firms commit to using 100% RE. Simultaneously, enterprises are visualizing and taking control of their energy consumption with more precision on internet of things (IoT) platforms....
There are plenty of parallels between physical security and cybersecurity, and wargaming is one of them. Cyber ranges—managed cybersecurity testing facilities—are a prime way of trialing, developing, and deploying cyber-defenses. Cyber ranges act as controlled, interactive, and realistic testing grounds; in combination with...
Where talent and infrastructure can be in short supply for enterprises, executives must think outside the box to develop their blockchain solutions while simultaneously driving new efficiencies and cost-savings for their firm. Piloting blockchain initiatives in partnership with academia can...
3D printing lies at the bottom of service providers’ Industry 4.0 technology offerings; there are many challenges left unsolved if it’s going to surpass cool use case videos to be the production process of the future. Providers are showing signs of solving these challenges alongside their manufacturing partners, but manufacturing...
Service providers admit that drone technology is not a mature segment of their offerings (see Exhibit 1). As Industry 4.0 gets ever-closer, alongside defense, monitoring, and mapping applications, drones promise to improve the efficiency of logistics operations and automate...
Pharma’s executives and artificial intelligence (AI) project leaders will undoubtedly have noticed the partnership between Microsoft and Novartis to leverage AI throughout the industry ecosystem and value chain. The competition to realize AI’s potential in pharma is already fierce—modeling disease, drug discovery, and diagnosis—before considering the challenges that the industry’s grappling with: siloed functions and data, cultural barriers, and ongoing operational transformations....
While companies’ recruitment processes must give diversity a platform, hiring is not the only problem. There’s constant talk around diverse hiring and whether “token hiring” or quotas work or are morally right, but in reality, retention is an equally, if not more critical, challenge for many businesses. Without retention, the effort to make diverse hires is essentially useless. It’s a problem throughout society—from school to the C-suite—where toxic cultures and barriers to progression lead to a wide range of...
Non-traditional disruptors are increasingly dictating the present and future of the industrial sector (encompassing the manufacturing and energy industries). Incumbent executives know this, and they also know that the talent isn’t available at scale—either internally or readily available to...
Sustainable change must be nothing short of complete business re-engineering. It must happen at an industry level—with enterprises, governments, and all third-party sectors—and not be sidelined into LED lightbulbs and fluffy PR. A recent survey by the UN Global Compact...
What this Top 10 Report covers HFS Top 10 Industry 4.0 Service Providers 2019 report examines the role service providers play in the evolving Industry 4.0 landscape. We assessed and rated the service capabilities of 21 service providers across...
The internet of things (IoT) has already ingrained itself in businesses, homes, and people’s lives—from the humble smartwatch to advanced industrial sensors. However, one of the IoT’s biggest hurdles remains in existing 4G infrastructure. 4G may sufficiently power your Alexa home assistant, but powering an entire smart city becomes problematic when autonomous vehicles or augmented reality need ultra-low latency to succeed for consumers en masse. If enterprises...
HFS' first-ever startup landscape report looks at the emerging startups and SMEs defining the future and the now of the Internet of Things (IoT) space - in parallel to our IoT Services Top10 and Hot Vendor reports. We...
As Industry 4.0 cements itself in enterprise strategies, the industrial sector must come to terms with an Achilles’ heel. The internet of things (IoT) is proving to be a pioneering change agent for industry, and cybersecurity is naturally a...
HFS’ 2019 State of Industry survey results portray total confusion surrounding cognitive technologies and machine learning (ML) in the “industrial” space of manufacturing and energy (including oil and gas): The C-suite is investing in and paying attention to...
Infosys, as an enterprise, has been recognized by the UN for its sustainability. Its clients must now push Infosys to translate this internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) prowess and its powerhouse sustainability partnerships into its services—and deliver the same...
You could produce a bible-length dossier on cybersecurity. Indeed, HFS’ State of Cybersecurity survey in 2018 found that it’s on everyone’s radar, but that there is also a damning lack of skills, too much suspicion, and a race for...
We spoke with Justin Keeble, an MD leading the sustainability arm within Accenture Strategy, about the past, present, and future of sustainability services—a still undefined space that is growing rapidly. In Part 1 we discussed the three eras of...
Three eras of sustainability services have brought us to where we are today: corporate social responsibility (CSR), understanding sustainability’s value, and now, business reengineering. We spoke with Justin Keeble, an MD leading the sustainability arm within Accenture Strategy, about...
One of the major defining characteristics of the IT services market for the past decade has been traditional firms’ ability to reinvent themselves as digital. The challenges are myriad. First, the core IT business isn’t going anywhere; it’s an essential building block of the modern enterprise....
What this Top 10 Report covers HFS Top 10 Internet of Things (IoT) Service Providers 2019 report examines the role service providers play in the evolving IoT landscape. We assessed and rated the IoT service capabilities of 23 service...
The insurance model leaves insurers with the burden of repair and replacement pay-outs—it’s a high-risk industry. Pressure on margins is increasingly making insurance a cut-throat game. Ultimately, some things can’t be helped, such as natural disasters, but as new...
The HFS Hot Vendors are an exclusive group of emerging players with a differentiated value proposition for the Digital OneOffice. HFS analysts speak with numerous exciting start-ups and emerging players. We designate a select group as the HFS Hot Vendors...
Part 2 of the two-part interview series with Genpact’s CEO and Chief Strategy Officer The traditional offshoring-driven labor-intensive outsourcing model is finding its bottom (and fast) as enterprises aspire to go “straight to digital.” One service provider that’s...
Part 1 of the two-part interview series with Genpact’s CEO and Chief Strategy Officer The traditional offshoring-driven labor-intensive outsourcing model is finding its bottom (and fast) as enterprises aspire to go “straight to digital.” One service provider that’s...
It’s fair to say the sustainability services space is not mature—if it exists at all. Sustainability consulting prowess lies with the likes of McKinsey, but you’ve got to do some real digging through traditional service providers to find any...
The limits of what 2D technology can achieve by mimicking 3D have been reached, whether it’s 3D TVs, augmented reality (AR) (like the unprecedentedly popular Pokémon Go), or virtual reality (VR) headsets. True 3D display, or “holography,” is about...
Citizens increasingly expect their local and national authorities to serve them with greater efficiency and accountability. Despite this, public sector digital transformation is still a very nascent space, with “best practice” hard to formulate and instill. If the providers who service the public sector hope to reap the benefits...
Partnerships are all the rage these days. To cross the chasms between businesses, policymakers, academia, and civil society, service providers can be the foundation of cross-party collaboration; their enterprise clients are the most critical stakeholder in pioneering these partnerships. The groups in Exhibit 1 have vastly varying priorities, and to bridge these gaps: Providers must ensure their enterprise clients understand the business value of partnerships with non-enterprise groups. ...
Evolving scientific evidence of climate change coupled with changing legal interpretations means that a new wave of lawsuits is washing over enterprises—whether they’re the source of environmental damage or just an indirect partner. The historical culture of outsourcing with closed eyes is disappearing as businesses find that their...
Manufacturing is undergoing a sustainable revolution. However, while HFS’ Manufacturing Services Top 10 2019 found that providers have mastered arts like supply chain management or sales and marketing support for manufacturing clients, their sustainability services lag; carbon footprint management, green...
As life expectancy grows, so does the demand for social care. Digital, data, and device innovations have the potential to cut overhead costs while simultaneously improving the quality of both care patients’ and workers’ lives. Social care providers in...
The Internet of Things (IoT) is ballooning—predicted to generate up to $11 trillion per year by 2025 As the IoT expands, so does the threat of cyber-attacks, detailed in recent HFS coverage. Baseline standards for the regulation of IoT...
We’re moving away from the relentless political satire in recent weeks (Hey, we’re only human!). We recently caught sight of an animated discussion on the future of Facebook’s new cryptocurrency at a local bowling alley. HFS’...
Failing fast is not a luxury that process industries can afford. Intense capital requirements, rigorous quality assurance (QA) processes, to name only 2 challenges, mean that all sectors of the process industry—oil refining, cement, steel, and the rest—are stuck in...
HFS’ Industry Blueprint: Utility Operations 2018 report found that executives’ priorities are split two ways. Thirty percent see growing bottom-line profit as the key business priority, while 23% go for customer experience. Sustainability is also causing a strategy headache—The...
Providers are rapidly moving toward end-to-end IoT (Internet of Things) solutions, fueled by expanding ecosystems of partnerships. Your IoT strategy must have the same ambition that we’re seeing in the service provider community; it needs to take advantage of the...
There is an imminent talent crisis facing most enterprises. At one end of their business, teams are facing existential change as large portions of their work are automated away or replaced entirely by digital technologies. At the other...
Catering to consumers who want sustainable products is retail’s megatrend, with two-thirds willing to pay a premium. Retailers are feeling the pressure to jump on the fair trade, organic, and vegan bandwagons, and address serious issues such as modern slavery....
Technology is evolving at a pace that only the most successful enterprises can keep up with (see Exhibits 1 and 2). Enterprises that hope to succeed in the hyperconnected economy cannot wait for traditional education to catch up—they must embrace...
If you continue to ignore the business benefits and social impact of sustainability, your enterprise runs the risk of losing public goodwill, employee morale, and competitive edge in its markets. Sustainability is not a constraint; as the world demands...
The average workplace accident costs a US enterprise $20,000, and the most serious fatalities can breach $100 million; whether or not a company is in an inherently dangerous industry, safety is its number one priority. Acceptance of workplace...
Process industries are crying out for advanced analytics, yet they stagger behind much of the manufacturing space on the journey toward Industry 4.0. Despite accounting for over 50% of its $35 trillion global output, process production that encompasses oil, steel,...
Enterprises are fretting over the talent shortage blocking their path to being a major player in the hyperconnected economy; 45% see a lack of internal talent as a major inhibitor. Despite this, only 14% are taking action, and of those,...
Many conscientious enterprise leadership teams are rapidly upping their sustainability game as their customers start demanding nothing less – traceable goods, ethical practices, low carbon footprints, the list goes on. To this end, they must choose service providers with...
It’s now very much in vogue to stick sensors and processors in just about every new device being rolled out—even your shoes aren’t safe. This ever-expanding use of IoT to deliver solutions means that security teams can no longer ignore...
Manufacturers are facing the ballooning hype of “Industry 4.0”— commonly presented by suppliers and consultants as a top-level mash-up of any semi-applicable technology. As we hurtle into this hyperconnected economy (Exhibit 1), manufacturing must define its own path: one different...
Process industries make up over 50% of the £35 trillion global manufacturing output, producing fuels, chemicals, cement, metals, paper, plastic, food, and drink, but their attributes differ significantly from general manufacturing or consumer goods. They have been historically lumped together...
