Digital Transformation Becoming Crucial for Businesses to Stay Resilient!
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a turmoil worldwide, affecting business and consumer activities. The constant state of flux has undermined the value of digital transformation as crucial for the operational resilience of companies. The digitally equipped and active companies have played their strengths to stay sound and continue operations, whereas others are increasingly considering digitalization as a choice now than late or never.
While it is still unclear how long COVID-19 will last, the growing uncertainty has accelerated the transition towards considering enabling technologies and positioning digital transformation at the front of the global business dynamics.
Pandemic is Compelling Businesses to Revisit Digital Transformation
Digital tools have become imperative for companies that are striving to stay resilient amid this disruption caused by the pandemic. Companies need to shift the focus on investing in emerging tech to build long-term resilience. Organizations can’t survive by simply digitizing the conventional processes. There is an urgent need for companies to focus on using technology to do things in a novel, better way as digital transformation is going to be fundamental for companies in realigning their business in the post-COVID-19 era. But what are the key technologies that will help companies drive growth as we cut through this crisis?
Technology Tools and Solutions for Digital Transformation
Automation
As social distancing heads towards becoming the new norm, businesses need to automate their operations to a larger extent. This stands most relevant for the manufacturing sector with Industry 4.0 framework allowing firms to stay operational without human intervention. Automation is also said to enhance productivity, ensure superior quality of products while keeping costs under control. Apart from this, Robotics Process Automation enables businesses to deliver delightful customer experience by application, add-ins, and application-based solutions.
‘Data’ Mindset
Developing and nurturing a data mindset and appreciating its strategic value is exactly what is going to differentiate the leaders from the laggards. From gathering information to concluding insights for tangible returns, businesses should consider aligning themselves with data management. They must leverage the data right to be more proactive and anticipate future actions and customer expectations, offer more relevant products, customer-centric services, optimize processes, and efficiency while mitigating risks at the same time.
Data Analytics-based Solutions
Competitive markets amid uncertainty have made it even more essential for organizations to access the right data points, analyze them thoroughly, and make informed and insights-driven decisions. Data analytics-based solutions can make businesses more proactive and responsive to this rapidly evolving situation. While analytics can play a crucial role in optimizing business operations, predictive maintenance algorithms will enable them to identify risks and take remedial action in advance to keep the system safe.
Connecting Things
Businesses that are leveraging the IoT will emerge as the frontrunners in enabling visibility into manufacturing or field operations. This stands most relevant for the remote monitoring and product and process diagnostics when even the local travel is not feasible. Be it creating actionable insights for connected equipment and driving productivity and minimizing costs with smart asset management to make intelligent supply chain solutions possible, analytics and IoT leverage real-time machine data to unlock new revenue opportunities and improve the customer experience. Businesses must track and trace assets, tools, equipment, and resources to become next gen for real. IoT-enabled tools and functionalities are likely to be more relevant in the post-COVID-19 era.
Cloud Computing
While the continuous growth of IoT devices and applications are driving edge-computing systems and reshaping how data is handled, processed, and delivered, the cloud offers numerous benefits for organizations that run on a traditional client/server network. Companies can integrate edge computing with centralized cloud computing (fog computing) and maximize the latent qualities of both while minimizing constraints. Many of them expect to so by co-locating their IT infrastructure with a data center.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can identify patterns from big data, which makes it a valuable tool for managing the coronavirus crisis. The powerful AI features, such as predictive analytics, image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition, and chatbots, etc., are not just enabling healthcare workers to diagnose but also trace the spread of the pandemic and monitor the vaccine development. Furthermore, during this pandemic, AI is also helping to sustain critical infrastructure, including asset-heavy industries. Using AI, companies can leverage predictive analytics to record the real-time as well as historic data transmitted by IoT sensors on their equipment. They can identify the slightest deviations in time and prevent failures before they occur, while also understanding and eliminating the root cause of problems.
This is the most suitable time for companies to accelerate the digital transformation and leverage digital tools to reimagine and reshape their business models and stay resilient and a step ahead of the competition.
PureSoftware’s bespoke digital solutions are enabling companies to automate manufacturing operations, improve asset management, streamline supply chains, and make smarter decisions for business continuity. Apart from assisting companies to navigate through their current challenges, PureSoftware delivers the services that enable companies to stay anti-fragile and build stronger resilience for the future.
