The Digital Transformation Dilemma – In the Industrial World

More than 80% of business leaders responding to a Gartner survey expect their company to become a digital enterprise by 2019.

To be a true digital enterprise, it requires more than a few technologies, what is really needed is the aspiration to evolve and adopt newer leaner ways to operate, proven and agile business models, hyper connected platforms, data analytics as well as superior collaboration capabilities. At the bottom of any digital disruption is the need to create better and more mature user experience that create new set of requirements and further provide new markets for it.

It’s evident that rapid advances in technology is redefining the whole social connection concepts and every passing day digital transformation is presenting to us in a new formidable face. Three years back, 70 start-ups achieved unicorn status, with a valuation of $1 billion or more. Whereas a regular Fortune 500 company took over 20 years to gain a $1 billion capitalization, digitization leaders like Google achieved it in 8 years and start-ups like Uber, AirBnb, Snapchat and others took only 3 years. While these are new forms of enterprises which are riding the digital wave to realize revenue streams and scale their business, in the industrial world such as oil and gas, aerospace, power and other core industries, many companies are also harnessing the immense capabilities of digital technologies to improve their operations, maintenance and product performance, and there by improve their business efficiency and profits.

This leaves us with an inevitable question. Whether you are ready for the digital transformation or not, if yes, how much you are ready to plunge in. And, while digital transformation provides unparalleled opportunities to create value and achieve success, it all boils down to superb execution to get where you want to be.

The Digital Transformation Dilemma

While rising the tide of digital transformation, there is an obvious status-quo dilemma that affects CIOs/CTOs at a global level. Where exactly should the IT budget look at and how to optimize the existing enterprise IT applications. The challenges that most business leaders must face now includes

• Why is digital transformation important for your company? – Because today technology is integrated with the business landscape in such a manner that you cannot name one industry that is not utilizing some or the other form of digital business frameworks. Industries need to utilize the new capabilities which is now possible with digital technologies to understand their systems and equipment to achieve greater business profits and to address changing business needs to stay in the competition.
• Which systems should be made digital? – Legacy systems and processes need to be assessed and rethought over. The systems need to be examined to see how existing business activities, processes and competencies perform and whether or not those are leveraged for the ensuring the best outcome.
• When should the systems be made digitized? With growing customer needs and ever changing market making it difficult to make a profit, industries now struggle to survive the inevitable. To meet growing customer requirements, a balance between existing technological capabilities and upcoming trends need to be achieved. Along with that industries now also must adhere to external influences like changing regulatory laws, shifting economy, stiffer market competition, and other business demands.

Surviving the Digital Transformation Dilemma

The digital technologies of IoT, AR/VR, AI, Blockchain etc. is knocking the door in a most persistent manner and demands the industry leaders’ attention without much time to lose. The digital universe is likely to increase multi-folds in the next couple of years and when you combine the changing consumer behaviour with the Omni-channelled services your competition offers, it becomes even more crucial to face it now than ever. The industrial world needs to identify the systems that can add value or reduce cost through digital capabilities.

The answer to the above raised questions lies in finding a balance between digital disruption and deliberation of human factor. The factors that can lead to successful digital transformation can be summed up as

• Each system, be it a legacy or relatively new one, those must be optimized to ensure a higher ROI
• Devices and systems that are safety critical must undergo digital transformation to ensure improved safety and hence realize exponential profits.
• Understand your customers better
• Bringing in the right blend of change agents
• Focus on governance of existing technology portfolio
• Shift focus from Infrastructure-centric to Operational Technology-centric decisions
• Building a high-quotient digital on-demand workforce

Quest Helps You Find the Right Balance towards Digital Transformation

Empowering clients to leverage technological, cost and performance related benefits during the fourth & all-ominous industrial revolution, QuEST offers digital capabilities across the product lifecycle. QuEST enables enterprises to meet the aspirational technological future with minimal threat of digital disruption related risks.

With data science expertise, enterprise software and system engineering laced together, QuEST’s digital transformation solutions help you grow investments by helping with thorough design, development and implementation of digital solutions. QuEST helps you with

• Edge Solutions by facilitating end-device data acquisition, analysis and control.
• Digital Software & Solutions to rope in the digital thread across traditionally isolated assets and processes that help creating digital twins. This enables real-time assessment of existing and future capabilities of any system.
• Digital Factories to facilitate detailed digital product engineering services with model based deployment as well as enable efficient digital manufacturing
• Pervasive Technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, augmented reality and many more to innovate & future-proof user platforms and ecosystems
• Combine Process Design and Design system integration (DSI), Industrial Asset operations knowledge, Predictive Data analytics, Document Digitalization & search engine, Industrial Apps (AR, VR, etc.), Simulation, Test & Validation, Connected factory/Twin to get the best of digital transformation.

QuEST also consults on digital transformation and helps with adaptation, identifies areas apt for digital transformation and helps bringing in the required changes. With the right combination of multi-domain knowledge, and pervasive technologies like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, machine learning, and many more that help innovate and future-proof varied user platforms as well as ecosystems to continually optimize & enhance user experience.