Pilot purgatory describes projects that prove the technology on a few machines or one site and then stall. The usual causes are not technical. The pilot measured activity rather than value, so no one can state the ROI; the integration with existing systems was done by hand; the budget owner for rollout is a different department; or the per-unit economics that worked for twenty devices fail at two thousand.
Avoiding it starts before the pilot: agree on what success looks like in business terms, choose a use case the operations team already wants, and plan the rollout path, including scalability of provisioning, support and data handling, as part of the pilot itself. Treating a proof of concept as a question with an end date also helps. The Industrial IoT guide covers this.
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