Monitoring Technologies in Industrial Systems

Monitoring technologies, which are at the heart of the industrial Internet of Things ecosystem, promise significant transactional efficiencies by making it easier to track product performance and contract compliance. These efficiencies are particularly compelling in industrial multivendor, multicomponent systems, where complex component interdependencies often cause disputes around liability in the case of product failures. Drawing on transaction cost theory, fieldwork, and a national survey of industrial original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), we estimate how product performance contracts are specified in these contexts, and how these monitoring technologies can impact ex post exchanges between OEMs and their suppliers. We find that systems architecture associated with multicomponent systems, as well as the presumed efficiencies of monitoring technologies, drive the contract designs through their potential impact on the disputes, monitoring, and contract writing costs faced by the OEM. However, we also find there are clear limits to the benefits offered by these monitoring technologies, as the greater monitoring facilitated by these technologies appears to exacerbate disputes. This counterintuitive finding comports with the view that when unforeseen interdependent failures occur, detailed data from monitoring may trigger a spate of disputes over new and unexpected information, as well as over the appropriateness of existing protocols for failure metrics and remedies.