TwineFrom digital twins to AI, the Internet of Things and production efficiency software, every part of a company, from the production line to the back office is ripe for increasing automation to improve performance.
The trouble is, many companies do not know where to start on their digital business journey, or how to replace legacy systems and upgrade manual processes with automation in an efficient way.
Where Technology Offers A Helping Hand
Software is the glue that helps any business work more efficiently. Cloud services, packages like enterprise resource planning (ERP) and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) are fast adding value to all sizes and types of business.
With broader strategies like digital twins, and the introduction of AI, solutions can span the business, connecting everything through the Internet of Things (IoT) to link departments together, removing office siloes, and helping sales, manufacturing, marketing and leadership work to the same goals.
The collective data from these efforts enables faster, more detailed analysis to help drive business planning, and solve common but critical problems like downtime reporting, supply chain issues and customer dissatisfaction.
How to Make Your Business Smart
While some of these systems can be snapped up through a cloud subscription, embedding them and integrating them into your business can still require expertise. And while your teams may be delighted to experiment with a raft of AI tools, a focus on business clarity and goals remains the priority.
To help deliver them, developers, integrators and data specialists can step into the knowledge gap many businesses suffer from, especially startups. They can provide the necessary insights to build a unified approach to solving business technology issues and aligning the solutions to strategic and operational goals.
The benefits of business smart software and automation include:
- Streamlining of repetitive tasks and production processes
- Faster, optimized, production workflows
- Reduced downtime through predictive maintenance
- Improved visibility across supply chain and logistics
- Reporting that helps identify scalable business opportunities
- Reductions in human error and smarter advice for leaders
Practical Examples of Business Automation Benefits
The scourge of any business is downtime, either on the factory floor, through blocks in the supply chain or system downtime like the latest Amazon AWS outage.
Many businesses accept downtime as a cost of operations, but it is a powerful example of where improvements can be made. Generating a downtime report, understanding the costs and helping leadership see the value of improvements and automation.
This is a classic example of capturing data, providing a clear report that can lead to business improvement. And it can be replicated across the business, highlighting what customers want in the form of product improvement through feedback analysis.
While for companies stuck in the digital dark ages, even a simple upgrade to a modern ERP or schedule management tool can finally put an end to a spreadsheet-based or paper-first approach that can leave teams wallowing in inefficiency.
Where Does AI Fit into All of This?
Practically every piece of business software, from the operating systems on office PCs to most SaaS, ERP, accounting and project management tools, now come with access to a range of AI features.
General AI tools can perform time-saving tasks like data or market analysis, writing reports or business posts, creating marketing material and other tasks. These can lead to cost savings, smarter leadership decision making, and help teams develop a more rounded understanding of the overall business.
Focused AI in, say, a customer experience management (CXM) or customer relationship management (CRM) project can deliver specific advice based on the data that develops in the system over time. It can highlight unusual events in real time, provide predictive insights and suggest improved customer efforts, messaging and marketing that is purely focused on your specific audience.
In production, AI can better understand equipment health through robotic visual inspection and analysis of temperature, vibration and other sensor data. And as robots take over more tasks, it can drive process improvements by building a better production line to minimise production gaps or refine steps and processes.
And these AI tools get smarter with every update and as more data comes in. As it analyzes your business more, this means an ever-improving relationship between your business and the AI. And as more workers get used to adopting and leveraging AI, there are more opportunities for a smarter AI-guided business at every rung of the ladder.
As AI appears in more tools, the value it provides, as long as results are fact-checked, grows. Leaders can gain clarity into complex business operations. Teams can collaborate smarter when planning future products and expanding production, all while giving workers and managers more time to focus on the key issues as AI removes much of the grunt work that adds noise and negative sentiment across working hours.
Vicky
Iya Mendoza