How to prioritize your next technology investment

Posted: September 04, 2026

What’s first: predictive maintenance or energy efficiency? Optimize production, or supply-chain operations? Do you monitor emissions, improve engineering efficiency, modernize your legacy systems, or do you dive into an AI co-pilot initiative? In an ideal world, you would do everything at once. Here in the real world, time’s short and resources are finite.

As another planning and budgeting cycle gets underway, there are more competing priorities, more technology possibilities, and even more urgency to act on them. Meanwhile, expectations for those investments to produce measurable business value are on the rise too.

So how do you decide what comes first? What value can an investment unlock today, and what can it make possible tomorrow? Does it target an immediate business opportunity? Does it create capabilities that can be reused and scaled?

Two AVEVA customers offer useful perspectives here. Newmont shows us how a technology investment can be prioritized around a clear opportunity to create value. Bayer, on the other hand, demonstrates how an investment can create a foundation for improvements that can be repeated and scaled across the enterprise.

Newmont’s approach: Start with a business opportunity

For Newmont, the investment centered on an opportunity to improve fuel efficiency, sustainability, and equipment performance. Newmont is the world’s largest gold mining company with operations all around the world. This particular investment takes us to Newmont’s pit mine in Lihir, where the company operates a fleet of seven shovel trucks and 49 haul trucks. But to pinpoint fuel- and emissions-saving opportunities, first Newmont needed a single source of reliable equipment data, which was scattered across systems and hampered by limited interoperability.

Newmont deployed AVEVA™ PI System™ to bring together equipment, fleet-management, and ERP data, then built analytics to examine fuel consumption, equipment health, maintenance, and downtime. Put together, the insights revealed multiple opportunities for improvement. Fuel benchmarking, for example, identified the potential to reduce fuel consumption by 5%, representing about $1.5 million in annual cost avoidance. Other analyses found opportunities to reduce downtime and parts costs and extend component life.

The investment case began with a tangible business opportunity: where can better data help improve fleet performance and reduce costs? The solution Newmont used to pursue that opportunity, however, was just as useful later in uncovering additional opportunities to improve operations.

Takeaway: A targeted business use case can scale into new applications

Bayer’s approach: Build a scalable data foundation

Rather than targeted value, Bayer's investment put standardization at the center. Bayer is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, with a global manufacturing network that spans batch, continuous, and discrete processes. Data flowed in from diverse systems and lacked a unified structure. So, Bayer set out to standardize OEE, give shift teams better tools, and make OEE tracking scalable.

Bayer built a common AVEVA PI System foundation, including a unified asset framework structure and standardized approaches to batch data and OEE loss accounting. Today, that configuration spans 15 sites and 55 plants, with approximately 2,000 users and 695,000 tags in use.

That foundation now supports applications ranging from automated OEE reporting, shift handovers, production-loss analysis, and AI-powered search across years of accumulated shift data. At some sites, Bayer has seen OEE improvements as high as 10%, along with savings of up to two days per month for process engineers researching production losses.

The investment case began with the foundation, rather than any specific application it might support. By standardizing the underlying data and technology, the foundation Bayer created makes future improvements easier and faster to deploy and scale.

Takeaway: An investment in a data-driven foundation can scale and accelerate use cases across the enterprise.

Two approaches, not two camps

Start with the problem or start with the foundation. Target a new value opportunity or target a capability. Put the two approaches side by side, and the difference matters less than it might first appear. Newmont built a quick win as lasting infrastructure. Bayer built lasting infrastructure that started winning quickly.

For many technology investments, the balance lies somewhere between immediate return and future leverage. The real question isn't which one to pursue, but where each investment sits on that spectrum and whether you're clear-eyed about the value you want it to create today, and the capabilities you want it to create tomorrow.

To hear more about Newmont and Bayer’s paths from investment to return, watch their full AVEVA World presentations, or schedule a consult with an AVEVA expert who can discuss your priorities.