Manufacturing analytics transition organization from barriers to benefits and from lack of expertise to real-time actionable insights, among other benefits. Courtesy: L&T Technology Services Ltd.
new-age, future-facing engineering applications will be key enablers. Making legacy systems future ready depends on key decisions. First and foremost, a thorough understanding of the needs will dictate the most appropriate digital strategy. As the business plan will rely on the digital strategy, it is important to align it with short-, medium-, and long-term goals. Once the strategy is in place, the right engineering applications will determine the success of the overall digital transformation experience.
Size digital transformation to fit
Digital transformation initiatives across industries have shown that one size doesn’t fit all, and instead, the approach has to be horses-for-courses. For instance, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can help integrate machines and processes, but they are not the best bet when it comes to long-term, future-proof changes. Organizations embarking on digital transformation often end up biting more than they can chew by entrusting IT teams with the responsibility of writing, testing and deploying in-house integration solutions. While such decisions are brave, the cost, time and risk they entail make them not worth making. This hastiness is detrimental as it can completely derail the initiative before it is initiated. In the end, the most important aspect of digital transformation is ensuring timely changes in small installments. Data plays a crucial role in bringing every element of the process up to pace, and it is therefore paramount for organizations to create a robust and holistic database, accumulating data from every single end point. In a digital landscape strewn with smart devices, every bit of data collected by engineering applications from various ERP, customer relationship
www.controleng.com
‘
The most important aspect of digital transformation is to ensure timely changes
’
in small installments.
management (CRM), product lifecycle management (PLM), and supply chain management (SCM) systems is critical. The idea should lead to making incremental changes without putting massive pressure on either IT or operations technology (OT).
Agile automation, human involvement
For the process to be agile, humans too have a crucial role to play. Radical changes are bound to attract resistance and cynicism, especially when machines tend to become more autonomous. However, it is important that company leaderships take the onus of making the human workforce aware of the purpose of digitization and how it can benefit everyone. In essence, digital transformation is as much about business progress as it is about easing human lives. The cultural change has to be the bedrock for initiatives such as size, scale and scope. Digital transformation will make machines smarter and vitalize human skills by using them in more critical and perspective-driven jobs. Human-machine synergy is pivotal to the scoping of tasks and thereby increasing overall productivity across enterprises. The future has arrived. Are we ready for digital transformation? ce
Narayanan Ramanathan is global head of digital engineering, L&T Technology Services Ltd., a Control Engineering content partner. Edited by Mark T. Hoske, content manager, Control Engineering, CFE Media and Technology, mhoske@cfemedia.com. control engineering
September 2020
•
15
