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“Digital transformation provides industry with unparalleled opportunities for value creation. It used to take Fortune 500 companies an average of 20 years to reach a billion-dollar valuation; today’s digital startups are getting there in four.”

The World Economic Forum’s Digital Transformation of Industries (DTI) Initiative

Several business leaders do not have a full understanding of digital transformation. But it’s been the buzzword of every keynote for the last five years. Still, few fully understand how digital transformation impacts their ultimate motive, the economy, and the society as well. Hopefully, by the end of this article, you will too.

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is the integration of digital technology into all aspects of the business. Other than digitizing existing processes, it also reshapes how the companies operate and then create value for customers.

Successful digital transformation employs lean thinking and also a culture of consistent improvement. Cloud-based solutions have lower switching barriers than the legacy on-premises solutions, making businesses adopt a test and learn approach, taking data-driven decisions, and hitting more than their capabilities.

Digital Transformation in the Manufacturing Sector

Blending operation technology with information technology–that’s what digital transformation is in manufacturing. The aim is to create an online-physical production system that delivers higher efficiency, more innovation, enhanced quality, and value for all customers.

We are now witnessing the rise of so-called “smart factories”–fully connected systems that are linked with continuous data flows, predicting and instantly adapting to new demands and conditions as they come.

Instances of digital transformation in manufacturing industry include:

Conditional Monitoring & IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things): Networked sensors inside the production equipment, instruments, and other devices provide live feedback to predict the quality issue products, improve machine lifespan, and reduce downtime in a process called conditional monitoring. It’s one of the most cost-effective benefits of digital transformation in the manufacturing process.

Big Data Analytics: In addition to condition monitoring, Big Data is used by manufacturers for making improvements across the board, from product quality to energy management, safety, and R&D. It can also bring improvements in customer journeys by creating customized experiences with reduced sales cycles.

Cloud Computing: Without cloud computing, Big Data has no existence. The amount of data needed for creating smart factory networks won’t fit on a server in the office cupboard. More than 59 zettabytes (ZB) of data (a zettabyte being 1021 or one sextillion bytes) was created, captured, copied, and utilized in 2020. There’s no limit on what can be done with your share when clubbed with smart algorithms.

Additive Manufacturing (3D Printing): The ability to print delicate 3D objects by using something more than a CAD model will surely change the face of manufacturing. It takes power out of the hands of massive factories and puts it into smaller localized facilities that provide shorter production runs to a huge base of the target audience.

AR (Augmented Reality) for Industries: The function of digital content on the real-world in a composite view without cutting the movement has several manufacturing applications that include assembly guidance, maintenance, and repair; quality control; and training. Unlike AR, VR cuts out the world and places the users in a simulated reality, which might be useful for training but lacks AR's broad range of applications.


Digital Transformation With Software- Ways to Succeed


While additive manufacturing, industrial AR, and condition monitoring might be outside the scope of different small and medium-sized businesses, choosing the right software will be all that’s needed to change your company. Most of the best solutions are pretty inexpensive with an incredibly short value time.


Those who take risks get on a path to victory when it comes to digital transformation. The overall impact of data collection and analysis can give an irreversible first-mover advantage. Those who use data-driven insights for making ambitious calls will surely get future growth and prosperity. Those taking a wait-and-see approach will get left behind the competition. Don’t hesitate on exploring the huge options of SaaS solutions available on the market.


3 Basic Motives of Digital Transformation Software:


To “win” at digital transformation, businesses should make use of digital technologies to provide:

    Impeccable customer experiences
    Personalization at scale
    On-demand access


The specific assortment of technologies needed to achieve the mentioned aims will differ significantly as per each company’s budget and strategy. But as the users of solutions like Splunk (data), Slack (internal comms,) Zendesk (customer service,) Hubspot (marketing,) Shopify Plus (B2B eCommerce,) and Salesforce (CRM) know very well, there is a huge number of SaaS solutions that can provide digital transformation progress in a few weeks with only a pretty modest and scalable investment.


How Just One Solution Sorts All the 3 Aims:


Manufacturers giving out complicated products can deliver on all the three mentioned aims by investing in a visual CPQ (configure, price, quote) tool like KBMax. With KBMax, non-technical users can easily build-out custom products from scratch, devoid of errors and any engineering input pretty quickly. It does so in these ways:


A 3D product configurator with virtual and augmented reality capabilities gives a highly interactive customer experience.
Every buyer gets a personalized product catalog, prices, and even intelligent recommendations based on in-depth customer profiles and machine learning.
Including a visual product configurator within a B2B, eCommerce website allows the buyers to know your products in a lot of detail before actually configuring and purchasing independently.

It’s not all as smooth as it looks

Digital transformation is revolutionizing industries, providing businesses with amazing opportunities for generating a profit and also creating value for their customers. But digital transformation is not without its fair share of risks–both economic and social.

These are the risks that businesses themselves should be held partly responsible for assessing and addressing. Digital transformation promises global mobility such as we have never seen ever before, thanks to completely digital workforces and workplaces. It’s our responsibility for ensuring that digital transformation caters to more than just the chosen ones.

3 Major Risks of Digital Transformation Industry

    Employment:

The terms “automation” and “digital transformation” are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. Digital transformation is about using this technology for the creation and deliver better value to customers. Automation is a means to an end.

Also, there’s no avoiding the fact that digital transformation will lead to a loss of some jobs, even if it is at the lower end of the spectrum.

Larger employers should take concrete steps to reskill and upskill their employees and make them digital savvy and also ready to adopt a high number of amazing career paths that the digital transformation industry brings to the table.

    Energy

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, economic growth has usually been correlated with carbon emissions and the use of natural resources. The result–we are now on the verge of a climatic disaster.

In China, we have watched this process in a very quick format. In the 1960s, the country emitted a small fraction of the fossil-fuel-generated carbon produced by the United States, but by the year 2006, it had become the world's largest carbon emitter.

Mercifully, China's green revolution seems to be tempering its fossil fuel consumption. Still, as digital transformation spreads more opportunities and prosperity worldwide, it's on to each company for ensuring that digital investments remain sustainable. Intel, SAP, and Apple are among those few tech companies that use 100% renewable energy in their operations.

    Security

This is a huge one. Concerns over data privacy and security have highly increased in recent years. Events like the Cambridge Analytica Scandal have highly affected the public consciousness and, in any which way, created a lot of mistrust and resentment on the exchange of data with third-parties–a practice that's crucial to digital transformation success.

In the wake of Covid, FOMO has left the companies in chaos to keep up, leading to the adoption of the latest and greatest in digital solutions without even adjusting their privacy policies to match. Businesses need to skip ahead of any future security fallout. This means over-investing in the safety measures and then communicating their credentials in layman's terms to prospective customers.

Governments and regulators should get involved too. Their main mission should be to bring  regulations and policies that protect privacy without compromising on innovation: current privacy laws and industry self-regulation are short on transparency and coherence. A practical regulatory framework demands close collaboration with the private sector and compromises on both sides.