Accelerate your operational business outcomes with Digital

Business process improvements result in marginal improvements. Six sigma and Lean would help to stretch it further. What if your business outcomes can be accelerated with re-imagination using Digital technologies and supported with business process execution using Digitisation and Digitalisation?

Big Data, Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics (using data and images), Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are now the Digital tools towards accelerating operational improvement business outcomes in many enterprises. Many types of Data sources are enabling this such as IoT or IIoT sensors attached to equipment, inspection videos and photogrammetry images, transactions and engagement systems, social, community, environment or many other data sources.

Digital is changing the way we interact whether in our personal lives or when we are in our business persona. We now have Digital enablers to customer engagement, Digital enablers to requesting and transacting business, Digital means of providing services or Digitalisation of services, Digital enablers to billing & payments, Digital enablers of engaging & managing the supply chain and also Digital means to having an engaged workforce. Robotic Process Automation is automating process steps tasks.

Digitalisation is everywhere, in every organisation, big or small, start-ups or innovative traditional enterprises. The traditional focuses of Digital have been on the consumer-end of the businesses towards improving the experience and acceleration of consumer outcomes. Competitive organisations continue to explore newer areas technologies adoption to achieve enhanced business outcomes. Even as this happens, organisations now see step change benefits by adopting Digital in support of achieving operational excellence.

Digital savvy boards now see Industry4.0 and Preventative maintenance as a driving force to achieve Safe, Reliable and efficient operations. Analytics of Data is crucial to optimal decision making. Beyond knowing what happened in the past it is also essential knowing what is likely to occur in the future and offer a range of possibilities to optimise in the future. Analytics trumps intuition.

Organisations are now able to take a 720 degree view with Digital. There has been a lot of focus on consumer-led revenue opportunities and costs efficiencies, which was more outside-in. There was very little value seen on how to make use of OEM-led sensors or inspection images driven data and associated predictive or prescriptive analytics. As OEM digital capabilities improve, there is now a strong drive to use Analytics to accurately predict wear and tear, prescribe when to actually take the equipment out of use for preventative maintenance using the predictive and prescriptive analytics. Customers are extremely wary of false alerts. Simple visualisation is helpful. Customers would rather see value when the Analytics are predictive and prescriptive enough to simulate what-if scenario. Artificial Intelligence further enhances the ability of the organisations to consider simulation of managing capacity to demand for maintenance. With such developments around the corner, operations-led efficiency improvements using Digital can not only assist in step-change productivity improvements but also now help organisations to seize revenue opportunities from continuing operations, which is more inside-out.

Central to Digital-led operational improvements is the emergence of the secure cloud and all the added Technology supply chain elements which support agile adoption to deliver incremental value. The change in Projects delivery model from Waterfall to Agile helps; also helpful is the convergence into DevSecOps thereby reducing friction that otherwise occurs as businesses are keen to achieve value incrementally rather than wait for that sunny day. Usage of Cloud reduces the long lead time of procurement to design, build, test and deploy. API and data exchange hubs on the cloud now enable seamless exchange of data between customers, suppliers and OEM’s. Software as a Service, security features now available on the Cloud and edge transmitting devices are all key enablers of data storage, data integration, data catalogues and data aggregation in the form of data lakes. Mixed Reality based maintenance execution improves efficiency, reduces errors and enhances compliance tracking. Analytics services and accompanied by machine learning including model-driven machine learning are all helping acceleration of value.

Nobody adopts technology for technology’s sake. An enhanced business outcome is an important imperative. Industry4.0 practitioners had traditionally applied Digital mainly to Manufacturing and Production. With the ability to now acquire in-use equipment performance data, there are many use cases for in-service equipment achieving Business outcomes such as reduction of Inspection frequency or Maintenance frequency. Whilst these result in improved customer experience of the equipment, they also contribute to financial outcomes. Not only will these reduce or avoid operating costs, the customers choosing to use such OEM provided analytics tend to benefit from revenues coming from continued operations. Leveraging Digital techniques to improve quality, safety, reliability and availability of equipment is now proving to be a competitive differentiator.

So, who is best positioned to influence improving operational outcomes using Digital? Will this be the emerging role of Chief Data & Analytics / Digital Officer expected to step up from gate-keeper role to Business Strategists?

Irrespective of who takes on the cudgels, Digital is here to stay and early adopters are seeing massive benefits. What do you say?

About the Author

This article was first published by Jagadish Rao Raghavendra on April 20, 2019

Jagadish is a Strategic Board adviser, senior Executive leader with specialisation in reimagining business models; who has been successful at building and/or turnaround Practice advisory, Presales, Sales enablement, Solution consulting capabilities for:

- Applications & Enterprise applications

- Modernising and Transformation to a secure hybrid Cloud

- Service Integration and Management in a multi-cloud environment

- Digital workplace solutions

- Digital transformation using IoT, IIoT, Big Data, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Drones and Robots

- IT Infrastructure services

More recently, Jagadish has influenced re-imagining a digitally enabled business model for a leading enterprise

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