Industrial Digitalization.

The last ten years have demonstrated previously unseen interest for innovating the infrastructure and way-of-working at large industrial corporations.

Aiming to eliminate all documents, accessing common product models instead of transferring documents and messages in design and manufacturing, moving from data collection to information management for product and customer behavior prognoses manufacturing companies compete for the unique opportunities in shifting paradigms for increased efficiency and the best positions to their customers. New processes, organizations and roles have emerged expediting and deepening this transformation launching complex and numerous business change programs that show great opportunities.

Yet, many of these programs fall short of expectations. Companies are challenged to find and maintain the definition of the scope and choice of the solution to achieve their stated purpose from initiation to delivery of increasing business value, that is define and execute their digital strategy.

At industrial companies 10 years of digitalization and reinvention of traditional processes and interaction of engineering, manufacturing, service with novel IT solutions provide exciting, new experiences for digital engineering, digital manufacturing, digital production, and digital service.

Major categories of industrial digitalization innovation programs concentrate on three areas: i. Legacy replacement; ii. Tool functionality; iii. Business improvement/innovation.

Experience shows that ability to manage non-technical strengths and challenges is the key differentiator highlighting management and leadership factors to maximize opportunities and avoid pitfalls as shown by Change for Business Results. A wide range of new business factors are brought into daily work to shorten the distance between market-related design and production, ranging from evaluating customer sentiments and group trends via models to identifying low probability/high impact production risks.

Industrial digitalization programs show a few typical characteristics including:

• Digital point solutions to experiment with technology and explore opportunities
• Digitalization started with focus at speed, ease and connection: New development environments, including reusability
• IT challenges in digitalization:
• IT procurement cycle: time length, timing, integrity with other programs
• Information model, data model – tool, legacy, target
• Integration strategy, model, tool
• Interplay of components of digitalization
• Cloud solution with tickets instead of “self-serving”.

Some lessons of industrial digitalization:

• Start with: Business opportunity and realization time

• How to create and maintain digitalization know-how
• How to maintain, improve legacy environment-infrastructure
• How to expedite by modern IT procurement, IT resource empowerment and standing IT policies / standards
• How to reuse, integrate different digitalization journeys in different parts of the company
• Communication and marketing strategy to build trust. Journeys and retakes?

Often, industrial digitalization is not one isolated effort but several initiatives that are loosely connected across different business and corporate organizations at industrial companies. Therefore, there should be several harmonized industrial digitalization strategy plans defining different destinations, initiatives of the collective digital journey in today’s digital age.

Industrial companies focus at digitalized ”point solutions” in manufacturing, production, quality control, operation optimization.

Often, another objective is to bring the “real world” closer to model, perfecting products, operations and exploiting new business opportunities. These include increased delivery precision, behavior prediction, customer experience.

Industrial digitalization is also about a major change in awareness and ability to utilize data.

Two main aspects of data utilization are:

1. Understanding and improving data collection and use practices in the company’s industrial digital ecosystem
2. Using this information for the next level in the company’s industrial digitalization journey, understanding data-model-tool-process-business value and its integrity in the industrial digitalization strategy.

Important information can be found about this field here.

To find answer to these burning questions, to plan and execute your optimal digital approach, to audit and validate your company’s journey in industrial digitalization using proven, independent professional experience with impressive world-wide industrial references contact Predict Change on: