The Industrial IoT Blog
IIoT Insights by Henry Costa
Category: Practice Building
Lessons on building and scaling high-performing Smart Manufacturing and IIoT practices.
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Building Your IIoT Solution Portfolio: From Platform to Practice
Read more: Building Your IIoT Solution Portfolio: From Platform to PracticeIf you are building an IIoT portfolio as a consulting company, the challenge is very different from running IIoT inside a manufacturing enterprise. You are not optimizing a single environment. You are selling outcomes to many clients, across sites, industries,…
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IIoT Skills Gap: What Engineers Need to Learn to Stay Relevant
Read more: IIoT Skills Gap: What Engineers Need to Learn to Stay RelevantLet’s talk about the IIoT skills gap in 2025. It’s real. It’s growing. And it is now affecting production, quality, and delivery in very visible ways. If you work in manufacturing. As an engineer, a tech lead, or the person…
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Managing Up, Down, and Sideways: The Hidden Skill of IIoT Architects
Read more: Managing Up, Down, and Sideways: The Hidden Skill of IIoT ArchitectsIf there’s one thing I wish more people understood about IIoT architecture, it’s this: the tech is hard, yes — but managing people up, down, and sideways is the real superpower. You can have the cleanest architecture, the best platform,…
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Building a Smart Manufacturing Consulting Practice: The First 90 Days
Read more: Building a Smart Manufacturing Consulting Practice: The First 90 DaysStarting a Smart Manufacturing consulting practice from the ground up is a bit like jumping onto a moving train — you need to get your bearings fast, build trust with new faces, and learn to solve real problems before you…
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Smart Manufacturing Nearshore: Lessons from Leading Cross-Border Delivery
Read more: Smart Manufacturing Nearshore: Lessons from Leading Cross-Border DeliveryLet’s talk about the nearshore model for Smart Manufacturing/IIoT consulting — what it really looks like in practice, what works well, where it struggles, and what I’ve learned after two decades building and leading teams across the U.S., Mexico, Brazil,…
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What IIoT Consulting Really Looks Like: Stories, Lessons, and a Bit of Reality
Read more: What IIoT Consulting Really Looks Like: Stories, Lessons, and a Bit of RealityLet me tell you what IIoT consulting has really been like for me—across automotive, metals, pharma, food, and a few other places where things get built, mixed, or assembled. I’ve been at this since before “Industry 4.0” was a thing,…
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How Hard Is It for a Small IIoT Consulting Company to Win Projects in the U.S.?
Read more: How Hard Is It for a Small IIoT Consulting Company to Win Projects in the U.S.?Let me just say it straight: for a small Industrial IoT (IIoT) consulting company, selling projects in the US market is tough. I’ve seen it from both sides — building a practice from scratch and sitting on the buyer’s side…
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Building Your First IIoT Smart Manufacturing Practice: A Playbook from Zero to Scale
Read more: Building Your First IIoT Smart Manufacturing Practice: A Playbook from Zero to ScaleI built my first Smart Manufacturing practice in 2006. I had zero direct reports, no budget, and honestly, no real idea what I was doing. Twelve years later, that practice was generating millions in annual revenue across three continents. Then…
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What I Learned Building a Smart Manufacturing Portfolio for Consulting
Read more: What I Learned Building a Smart Manufacturing Portfolio for ConsultingCreating a Smart Manufacturing or Digital Manufacturing portfolio for a consulting company is one of those things that sounds simple on paper but is anything but in real life. Over the past two decades, I’ve built and led practices from…