Clutch Yet Again Rates Fingent As The Top Custom Software Development Company

As a dominant software development company, Fingent sets the bar high in building highly affordable products for companies small and large. We’ve become the trusted partner in enterprise solutions for some of the world’s leading businesses like Johnson & Johnson, Sony, and PwC. Our work and our strong leadership in technologies like .Net, NodeJS, AngularJS, AI enabled Chatbots and Microsoft, has once again caught the attention of Clutch.co, as they recently recognized us as Australia’s top B2B company.

Clutch, is a B2B rating and review platform located in Washington, DC. In their latest report that we were named in, their dedicated analysts evaluated technology sub-services based on their expertise, their portfolio of work, and their ability to deliver top-notch products for their clients. Their independent review process is meticulous and transparent, and we’re especially grateful to our clients for taking the time to leave a review or speak with Clutch analysts over the phone to provide feedback.

Fingent CEO and MD, Varghese Samuel

Beyond the generous reviews left on Clutch, our success is also reflected on the company’s sister-sites: Visual Objects and The Manifest. Visual Objects showcases portfolios from various creative software developers, to aid prospective clients in visualizing a future project before hiring. The Manifest also helps prospective clients, through industry reports and how-to guides, that provide businesses with practical knowledge of the services and technologies used by the B2B companies. Here, we are listed and recognized for our abilities in NodeJS and AngularJS. 

Our constant approach in redefining business with trending technologies like Microsoft and Artificial Intelligence have enabled us to rank amongst the top-rated custom software developing companies in Clutch, Visual Objects, and The Manifest.  We have repeatedly been appreciated and recognized for our capabilities in AI-driven Chatbots for enhanced user experience.

Our motive to shape the future of industries with enhanced, custom software solutions has led us to where we are today. On behalf of Fingent, we would like to thank all of our clients that we have had the pleasure to work with, and Clutch for this prestigious recognition.

If you would like to learn more about our services, check out our profile in Clutch.

Best Retail Mobile App Features To Enhance Your Customer Experience

Speed, convenience, innovation, and customer experience – these are the elements that drive the retail industry today. With consumers becoming increasingly connected and demanding personalized services, retail brands can no longer sit back and expect a good product to do the trick for them. Newer, smaller and yet better tech-enabled retail players are pushing into the market and giving big brands a run for their money. Technology is thus the biggest competitive advantage in today’s digital age, and retailers are recognizing the importance of mobile app technology to communicate their tech-driven goals. In this blog, we will discuss exactly how retail mobile apps are helping retailers boost their business. We will also discuss 3 must-have features in retail apps.

Related Reading: Although mobile apps are a source for greater business success, it’s vulnerable to hacker attacks. Check out the top 8 security issues incurred in mobile app development. 

How A Retail Mobile App Can Help Boost Business

The number of mobile apps available today is a testimony to the popularity of mobile apps across the globe. A report by Statista shows that as of the first quarter of 2019, Android users were able to choose between 2.1 million apps and Apple’s App Store had nearly 1.8 million available apps. The demand for apps keeps increasing every day, which proves that they are the preferred choice of interaction among consumers today.

Convenience is the factor that is tipping the scales in favor of mobile apps. E-commerce and online shopping brought shopping into the homes of customers, but mobile apps go one step further and bring it to their fingertips. Here are a few more reasons how retail mobile apps are helping businesses boost sales.

• Increases Reach

The most important aspect of sales and marketing is to reach customers where they are. That’s where mobile app technology brings the biggest advantage. Here are some statistics to show that mobile devices are the best way to reach customers.

• Up to 70% of web traffic happens on a mobile device.
• U.S. consumers’ time spent on mobile crosses 5 hours a day.
• Customers have 2X more interactions with brands on mobile than anywhere else.
• Mobile app usage for shopping grew by 54% in 2017 and continues to increase.

As these statistics show, mobile apps are where the customer is and that is where retailers must focus.

• Builds Loyalty

Mobile apps allow the customer to interact directly with the company quickly and on their schedule. Push notifications and recommendations on their mobiles keep them connected to your brand at all times. Many mobile apps incorporate loyalty programs and gamification features into their mobile apps. This helps in increasing engagement with customers in the way they prefer it.

It also discourages customers from having to look elsewhere – the more they shop, the more they win and the more loyal they become. Rewarding customers for social sharing and referrals build loyalty to the brand as they feel included in the success of the business.

• Improves Efficiency

Mobile apps do much more than bring your products to consumers. They help in building efficiency along with providing ease of access. When it comes to helping customers, features like integrated shopping carts and payment gateways make the purchasing process much smoother and hassle-free.

From the operations perspective, this helps efficiently record, track and implement invoicing and inventory management. Mobile apps also offer features like employee scheduling, CRM, real-time inventory check-up and other functionalities that help employees better serve the needs of customers.

Contrary to driving business away from brick and mortar stores, mobile apps can impact and support in-store operations as well. With features that can help locate products in the store, Wishlist building, barcode scanners, and faster payment options, mobile apps can provide excellent support in-store as well.

Top Technologies Used to Develop Mobile App

3 Must-Have Features in A Retail Mobile App

Now that we’ve established how important mobile apps are in the retail business, let’s see what will get your app ahead of the competition. For a mobile app to be successful, it must be packed with features that are focused on making the customer’s journey hassle-free and enjoyable. As a start, here are some features that you absolutely must include in your mobile app.

1. Easy to Use Interface

This is one of the most important aspects to concentrate on when building a mobile app. This is the face of your company and the first point of interaction for a mobile app user. Logic dictates that this is where the customer will decide whether he wants to continue his journey with your brand or not. A few key principles to remember here are Simplicity, Ease and Brand Recognition. Do not overload your UX with too much information. Keep it simple. Ensure that the user can navigate through your site easily with simple drop-down menus and clear icons. Ensure that your brand colors, logo and other aspects of your brand image are clearly communicated in your UX.

2. Hassle-Free Purchase Options

Impulse buys are the most important advantage for retailers even when it comes to mobile apps. The best way to capitalize on this is to ensure that the customer is led through the purchase process quickly and without any hiccups. The moment customers face a glitch in the purchase process, the frustration caused could overrule their impulse to buy. The result is abandoned carts and loss of customer loyalty.

To combat this, it is important to offer multiple purchase options. In addition to cash and card on delivery, other options like debit and credit cards, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and PayPal must be included. This will allow the customer to make the purchase the way they prefer. Easy returns options are another way to ensure that the customer doesn’t hesitate to make the purchase. Ensuring that the inventory is up to date is also an important aspect of eliminating buyer frustration and improving customer retention.

3. Personalized Experience

Machine Learning has brought the online shopping experience a long way from what it used to be. Shoppers don’t have to deal with irrelevant spam emails or browsing through thousands of products to find what they want. Apps equipped with machine learning now know exactly what the customer wants when they want it and the best way to give it to them.

Apps are continuously learning customers’ buying preferences and finding ways to personalize the experience for them. Push notifications featuring the items they like and specialized offers for those products will give buyer’s added incentive to purchase from you.

Are you looking forward to building an innovative mobile app to boost your revenue? Get your FREE mobile app specification template here!

Go Custom with Retail Mobile Apps

While we have presented just three must feature to be included in your mobile app, there are many more that may be relevant to your particular brand and customer base. At Fingent, we specialize in custom-built mobile apps to cater to our client’s unique needs. Give us a call and let’s talk.

Read More: Mobile App Development : 4 Tips To Consider

Key Features And Benefits Of An Artificially Intelligent Ecosystem For App Development

Artificial Intelligence is omnipresent in this digital era. Artificial Intelligence and human intelligence work together to deliver numerous solutions at the technological forefront. The global artificial intelligence market size is expected to reach $169,411.8 million in 2025. The leading application development trendsetters such as IBM, Microsoft, and many more global leaders have adopted Artificial Intelligence as an inevitable part of their advancements in bringing up the intelligent app ecosystem.

Artificial Intelligence has its key segments in the market based on Technology and they are Machine Learning, Speech Recognition, Image Processing, and Natural Language Processing along with various other industry verticals.

What is an AI application?

Putting it in simple words, AI is the reason why your smartphone when connected to your car’s Bluetooth gives a beep with a message about the traffic conditions and in what time you are likely to reach your destination you often travel to. Artificial Intelligence makes this possible via its pattern recognition skills which it formulates over a period of time, known as machine learning!

For instance, Microsoft has developed a productivity AI application known as ‘Office Graph and Delve’ of Microsoft Office 365. It collects data and shows only relevant content to users according to their priority. Other examples include:

• Voice recognition apps with GPS.
• Search engine applications.
• Chatbots or AI-enabled assistants.
• Personalized shopping applications that make use of Google Analytics.
• Financial applications that are both accurate and efficient in calculations and providing results, such as automated advisors, powered by AI.
• Autonomous vehicles, drones.
• Transport apps powered by AI, Google Maps, etc.
• Social Media applications.
• Smart home devices that make use of data science like smart voice assistants.
• Creative arts such as Watson Beat, yet another powerful AI implemented the app.
• Security apps that implement Facial Recognition and image processing technologies.

Making Mobile Apps Intelligent With AI

The first quarter of 2019 witnessed over 2.1 million apps available in Google’s Play store for Android users. Apple’s Appstore was the second largest to have over 1.8 million apps ready for download.

Related Reading: Read on to learn how voice app can enhance your business. 

With such intense competition, app developers are looking for ways to create personalized applications. The solution to this is AI implementation. The role of AI in an intelligent app ecosystem is to make the applications learn the intention of users. Machine learning and Data analysis features form the Intelligent Ecosystem for these applications.

The AI ecosystem increases the efficiency of programs and machines and also allows users to predict user intentions online like their purchasing trends and other social behaviors when they are online. The following are some of the roles played by Artificial Intelligence in an intelligent app ecosystem:

• Multi-faceted technology that incorporates machine learning algorithms and deep learning.
• Implements Big Data, Neural Networks in its programming.
• Predicts user communication and intention online in real-time.
• Automates functions.
• Can make informed decisions for specific users.
• Can create analytics from a history of searches.
• Interprets tasks using preassigned commands.
• Provides personalization.
• Accurate Insights
• Perfection In App Development Features
• Efficient Ways to Complete Redundant Tasks
• Enhanced User Satisfaction
• Notifies Important Details making operations easier

AI integrated applications help in improving success rates and also increase app performance. Along with helping machines to mimic humans and its problem-solving capacity, AI has become an inevitable part of app development with its ability to learn, perceive and manipulate data.

AI protects an application user’s data. It performs an analysis of the data for identifying user patterns and behavior online in real-time. This data can be used to provide better customer experience and for user engagement.

Role of Artificial Intelligence is also in aiming at generating revenue through efficient user interfaces.

Related Reading: Are you planning on enhancing your business with AI? Here is a guide just right for you.

The Intelligent App Ecosystem: How It Functions

Applications are becoming more intelligent each day. Staying ahead of the game is crucial for app developers with users wanting a personalized experience and much-improved experiences. The following are the latest trends in AI intelligent app ecosystem:

• Wider use of machine learning techniques.
• Wider adoption of microservices for app development.
• A rapid increase of numerous platforms to develop applications.
• A rise in the adoption of various machine learning models.

Various layers of technology are involved in the development of artificially intelligent applications. Artificial Intelligence plays a major role in modeling the market dynamics of businesses to a large extent. In addition to creating new opportunities, be it for startups or even for large industrial giants, artificial intelligence provides numerous implications on the development side including the following key features:

1. Customer Experience with machine learning defines an intelligent app ecosystem

Every business needs high-quality data that will suit their specific application needs. So the machine learning models are required by user data specific companies. For instance, for Google, it was the ‘search’ function, ‘entertainment’ was defined by Netflix, Facebook for the ‘social’ amenities and many more such specific intelligent applications.

Many more categories include healthcare, personal assistants, retail, agriculture, sales, security, automation and many more industry verticals. Machine learning along with user critical data have formed the basis of these applications on the artificial intelligence vertical.

Related Reading: Here’s how you can redefine your business with AI chatbots.

2. Cross-platform services With The Intervention of New Platforms

There are many cross-platform mobile applications developed on cross-platforms such as hybrid and native platforms. Consider Facebook Messenger and Amazon’s Alexa. The added features make it more user-friendly and even beneficial on the sales front. This also becomes simpler for industries to perform when they can deliver their products/ services across such platforms as it is all about adding a new layer of API that connects with the entire existing microservices for authentication and other critical functions. These interfaces, thus revamp the existing applications into macro-services.

3. Machine Learning Models And Intermediate Services For Business-Specific Platforms

Pre-trained machine learning models can be used as plug-and-play for performing functions such as natural language processing, image processing, etc. These are the intermediate services. On the other hand, there are raw intelligence providers that form the building blocks. These two are the major 2 types of industries that provide value to the intelligent app ecosystem.

4. The Big Data Technology Analysis And The Intelligent App Ecosystem

Do you know what Hadoop has contributed to enabling an artificially intelligent ecosystem of app development? The hardware companies that store large chunks of IoT data and other transactional data perform? Well! Big Data Analysis is how businesses keep up with the intelligent app ecosystem.

According to the latest IDC forecast, 75% of the commercial enterprise applications will make use of AI by 2021. This shows that deploying AI for app development will lead your business to have an intense advantage over your competitors in the near future.  To learn more about how you can capitalize AI for your business benefits, get in touch with our experts today!

How Face Recognition Apps Are Defining The Future Of Competitive Industries?

There has been a lot of talk about Face Recognition Apps recently. It has received accolades for its use in enhancing security as well as flak over privacy concerns. Speculations aside, there is no denying that face recognition software has revolutionized the way we perceive technology. It is no longer a faraway concept as it finds a place in our pockets through mobile technology.

In this blog, we will look at the technology behind face recognition software, what makes it tick and how it has found application across industries.

What Is A Face Recognition App?

Face recognition is a biometric technology that creates a face print of an individual by mapping out his or her facial features mathematically. This face print is stored and used to compare a digital image of a person verifying their identity.

This mapping is done by identifying 80 nodal points on a human face. These nodal points are used to measure different variables of the face. The width of the forehead, the length of the nose, the shape of the eyes – these measurements are captured on a digital image of the person’s face and stored as a face print. Deep learning algorithms are then used to identify a person in comparison with the face print.

This technology has been used in various ways from automatic photo tagging by apps like Facebook for authentication and identification by Apple’s iPhone X. The way in which Apple has used this technology is interesting. Face ID technology, which allows users to unlock their phones using the stored face print, is designed with 3-D modeling. The software compares over 30,000 variables to fine-tune recognition capabilities. This face print or Face ID can be used as authentication for purchases done with Apple Pay and other Apple stores. Amazon Rekognition, Google Cloud Vision API and other image analysis APIs can be now used to add facial recognition capabilities to other applications.  

The inclusion of technologies like augmented reality, mixed reality and more have made face recognition software a powerful force. At Fingent, we developed a mixed reality application using Microsoft Hololens. This application helps in the identification of a person and also links the face print to the biodata of the person. It will also be able to capture images and compute similarities between the captured image and all the other images in a secure database.

Read More: The future of communication and security using augmented reality.

The Role of Face Recognition Apps in Safety and Protection

According to a Javelin Strategy and Research study, identity fraud hit a record high with 15.4 million U.S. Victims in 2016 and an increase of 16 percent from previous years. In a connected world where such vulnerabilities exist, face recognition software is proving to be an invaluable asset. The software is helping law enforcement and corporate to put a name to the faces of criminals who have been playing havoc with stolen identities. Some applications of face recognition software in ensuring safety are:

• Identity validation at ATMs and prevention of identity theft with photo IDs.
• Face recognition surveillance systems in schools to protect students from expelled students or parents who have been flagged as dangerous.
• Equipping law enforcement personnel with identification of criminals and contextual data to warn them of dangerous persons before they approach offenders.
• Automated facial recognition (known as AFR) helps in forensic investigations by identifying individuals on surveillance cameras and videos, as well as in recognition of dead/unconscious individuals at crime scenes.
• Protecting retailers from shoplifters by warning security personnel of known criminals with a record. It also helps them avoid potential violence in the store by warning them when dangerous criminals or disgruntled former employees enter.

How Various Industries Can Benefit from Face Recognition Apps

Apart from ensuring safety and prevention of identity theft, face recognition software has many commercial applications as well. Many organizations across industries are recognizing the vast potential of face recognition apps and exploring different ways to capitalize on its features. Let us look at the Healthcare and Retail industries as an example.

Healthcare

Healthcare is constantly making giant strides with technology and facial recognition is contributing in unexpected ways. Researchers from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in the United States have come up with a face recognition system, which can diagnose a rare genetic disease called DiGeorge syndrome. People with this syndrome exhibit particular facial anomalies, which give them characteristic expressions that can be detected by facial recognition software. Despite the many challenges associated with effective detection, the team has developed software with an accuracy of 96.6%.  

Another example of face detection software being used in healthcare is the facial recognition app developed by Listerine. This app enables a blind person to detect when somebody is smiling at them, by setting off vibrations when the face recognition app detects a smile. This helps the blind respond better in social situations, thus contributing to their quality of life.

Speaking about the further possibilities that technology can bring to healthcare, Christoffer Nellaker, of the Medical Research Foundation’s Functional Genomics Unit at Oxford says: “A doctor should in the future, anywhere in the world, be able to take a smartphone picture of a patient and run the computer analysis to quickly find out which genetic disorder the person might have”. This is already coming true with the help of face recognition.

Related Reading: Check out how modern healthcare is revolutionizing with automation.

Retail

Retailers have been using augmented reality to improve the customer experience for a while now. The retail giant Sephora has gone one step further and added a live 3D facial recognition feature to its Virtual Artist application. This enables a more accurate facial tracking and rendering, allowing users to virtually try on Sephora’s various products while they are moving in real time. Parham Aarabi, CEO of ModiFace, which is the developer of this function for Sephora says: “We believe the ability to see yourself with products can impact sales online … and thus the integration on Sephora will, based on our expectation, result in increased conversions and user engagement.” The goal with this move is to enable customers to try on their products in a fun and more interactive way. The accuracy enabled by this technology will go a long way in enhancing the customer’s experience and boosting sales.

By using face recognition software in making educated guesses about a potential customer’s gender, age, etc., big retail giants are optimizing their ad campaigns to specific target audiences. Such advertisements are more effective as they help deliver a targeted message that has a powerful effect on consumers. An example is the “Because I’m a Girl” campaign rolled out by children’s charity Plan the UK. The charity created bus billboards, which would scan the viewer’s face and display an ad depending on the viewer’s gender. This was done to highlight the plight of women who are denied rights based on their sex. Brands like Virgin Mobile, Nike and others have also used face recognition software to create a more immersive ad experience for their customers.

Related Reading: Find top ways to leverage smart IT solutions for your retail business. 

Implementing Face Recognition Technology

Face recognition software is closer to home than we think, and it is apt to look at ways in which your company can capitalize on its capabilities. Talk to us and let’s discuss how.

Before I give a definite yes or no to this question, let’s understand the concept of User Interface or UI.

Remember back in the days when owning a Gameboy was as good as an Xbox now, when 30 minutes of Super Mario Land was as intense as a game of graphically dense Far Cry 5 today? Or how uber cool it was to hit your favorite music on a Sony Walkman while you browsed through your myspace account?

Fast forward to 2019, where software is more intelligent and much better looking, even the older millennials cannot ditch their Xboxes to go back to the Nintendo DS nor can they return to myspace from Instagram. Did they love their Nintendos? Yes. Did they enjoy using it even though it wasn’t as graphically demanding? Yes. Then what changed?

All thanks to better UI designers.

Related Read: The Power of UX and UI in Delivering Successful Digital Assets

What Is UI?

UI or User Interface is simply the link between your customer and your product. Whatever elements your customer can see, touch or feel to navigate through your product can contribute to the User Interface. Be it the mobile phone we use, the smartwatch we wear, the car we ride or the websites we use. Everything has a User Interface.

Talking about software, do customers really care what your software looks like or do they just want any platform to get their work done quickly?

The answer is Yes. Customers do care about the interface you provide. Are they aware of it? Probably not.

Psychologically, most users aren’t consciously aware of the interface they use to navigate through the software. It is through their experience on your website that they decide whether to stay or leave. This is where the importance of User Experience or UX comes to play. A well thought of User Interface can subsequently lead to good user experience and can undoubtedly help you retain your users.

Here are a few points that you need to keep in mind when you design your next product to help you retain your customers/users.

1. Take Time to Research

This is one of the most underrated steps in the software design process. Many product teams focus on having the requirements in place and getting work started without “wasting” time. Little do we realize that spending those extra hours in user research and understanding the end user, can do wonders for your product.

Nowadays companies even consult with independent UX research companies that conduct user interviews, focus groups, personas, etc. for them. According to Forrester Research, a good user-centric design has proven to boost ROI and bring up conversion rates by up to 400%.

Moreover, in a study by the Design Management Institute, “design-centric” companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 211%.

Source – The Design Management Institute

It is imperative that the product that is being delivered to users cater to their needs, accommodate their goals and reflect their behavior in order to make them use your product. A design that does not take into account what the customer wants will only prompt them to move away from your product.

2. Make Educated Decisions

Needless to say, it is absolutely crucial that design teams are aware of the latest trends in software design and are up to date with the current design principles. As a designer, you simply cannot afford to offer a dated solution to your user. So make sure your product team takes that extra step to study what solution your competitors are offering for the same problem and try to come up with a better solution.

This does not mean you need to go over the top with new ideas and designs. For example, a trash can icon is synonymous to “Delete” in the digital world and replacing that with any other fancy icon would only confuse your user.  

Some very well thought UI creations that come to my mind are

• Charlie AI
• Samsung SDS Flow
• Airbnb
• Bellroy
• ESPN Sports Programming

3. Use a Style of Communication that Suits Your Audience

Understand your user base and use a communication style that best suits their age and interests. Say for a children’s website or a fashion e-commerce application, a dull downbeat communication style might not sit well with your younger audience and could force your customers to move on to an application they can relate to emotionally.

On the other hand, a professional network like LinkedIn will require a precise and formal tone as the larger audience on it are strictly there for professional reasons.

Using a tone that makes sense to your audience is very important to capture their attention and build trust with them. Users like to know the “people” behind the software and the tone of your website does just that.

4. Consistency is Key

Like we talked about setting a communication style for your website, it is just as important that this style is maintained throughout the website. The importance of being consistent cannot be stressed enough when it comes to optimal user experience. Users tend to use applications that are consistent in their elements, color scheme, typefaces, and interactions.

Say, if your application displays notifications on a side panel, maintain all notifications on the side panel throughout the site. Believe it or not “Your users don’t like surprises”.

5. Include a Knowledge Base

Let’s explain this with an example. Patrick wants to use your application. He loves the concept and the UI design. He can’t wait to start using your app as he has heard it is perfect for his needs. But Patrick has no idea HOW to use your product. He searches for a guide to help him, but found none. Disappointed, he had to move to another application that had a detailed manual.

Now, losing a customer like Patrick is such a shame. Had you spent that extra effort to create a beautifully crafted knowledge base that explains every functionality and feature of your app, you would have retained millions of users like Patrick.

Understand what your users are looking for. If you don’t want to maintain a separate knowledge pile for this, you can add all the information you want to show the user in the UI, by making it seem less like a knowledge base but more like an intuitive design. You could even integrate an AI bot to answer popular queries for you instantly.

When customers are able to find answers to their questions easily and without having to Google/Quora for answers, the overall customer satisfaction increases and also increases user engagement on your website.

Related Read: CTOs Guide – How Robotics and AI Can Improve Customer Experience

6. Less is More Vs More is More

Minimalism isn’t just a fancy word for lazy design. A minimalist design is a visual concept that seeks to embrace simplicity in design, in order to rope in users only towards what is most important.

When catering to a mature target audience, minimalism can be more attractive than a page full of creative design elements, sliding panels, glittering headlines, and modish popups. If your aim is to urge your customers to focus on a particular set of products, minimalist design is the path to choose.

However, it is crucial to understand your customers here. A minimalist design may not work as well for software designed for children, like an educational game. Younger audiences probably would not understand the aesthetic that you are trying to create and may move away to a more attractive website.

7. Improvise and Adapt – The Secret Sauce of Software Design

This is probably THE most important point that businesses need to keep in mind in order to retain their user base for years.

According to a survey by Skype, Adobe, Norton, and TomTom, less than half of the technology users do not like to upgrade software when they should. The simple reason is that people are comfortable with the way things work and do not want to risk getting an update until it’s proven to work for someone else.

On the contrary, users are attracted to new features and functionality as well.

So how do we ensure our software stays on top of its game to an audience that are hesitant to upgrade but wants new stuff too?

Let’s look at the case study of a simple messaging software.

Starting with a messaging platform to simply connect with friends and family via text messages, the team introduced push notifications on mobiles to ensure messages are received even when the application is not running in the foreground. Once the application garnered a few users, more features like photo and video sharing were added and while they were at it, some edit and filter features were included too. Once the application turned out to be an indispensable communication tool for its users, they added voice and video call features.

At this point, users were receptive to all these subtle changes because they hadn’t realized that the application as it was in the beginning, had completely transformed into something much bigger. As far as the customers knew, their experience on the application was flawless. Once the users were comfortable with the current working, the team added group conferencing and even payment integration. Finally, what started as a simple one-on-one messaging app had the potential to replace at least 4-5 apps that were needed every day.

This is the story of how the messaging giant “WhatsApp” increased its user base from a humble 250,000 users to more than 1.5 billion active users standing right next to Facebook and YouTube.  

Takeaway – Start by building trust with your customers. Be attentive to your customer’s needs and incorporate improvements without overwhelming the users.

Some popular applications that have evolved into tech giants over time are

• Google Suite
• Adobe Photoshop
• Amazon
• Windows
• Android
• SAP
• iOS

Knowing how to improvise and adapt is the reason these intelligent businesses remain relevant in the market for years.

Related Read: How AI is Redefining the Future of Customer Service

Summing Up

Coming back to the beginning of this article, we asked you why millennials are unable to switch back to older technologies even though they enjoyed the UI at that time. Gameboys for one, were well researched, were consistent, came with a detailed manual and had a great design given the technological limitations of that age. Where they failed to deliver was improvisation. Users are always looking for the next big technological breakthrough.

To stay on top of your game, you must be open to enhance your product for improvements and cater to the continuous cycle of changing customer demands. Product teams should focus on providing users with a flawless experience, be it through the user interface, functionality or customer service. A user-friendly UI is a catalyst for building good relationships with your customers. Retaining your users become easy when you have earned their trust by consistently meeting your customer’s expectations.

By building sustainable software that sees well into the future, we at Fingent, believe our partners deserve the best that technology can offer. Feel free to contact our consultants to get an insight into how we work to deliver your dreams.

Customer Experience or CX may be the single most important factor that could make or break a business in today’s customer-centric market. A good product, a great marketing team, and competitive pricing can all amount to nothing if the customer experience isn’t up to the mark. As more and more businesses head towards brand transformation, it is vital that they keep the customer experience at the center of things.

In this blog, we will discuss why a memorable Customer Experience is key for brand transformation and how you can achieve it for your business.

How Important is Customer Experience?

Before we get into the importance of customer experience, let’s have a look at what that term really means.

Gartner defines customer experience as “the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels or products.”

A take on the definition of what a customer has come to mean today was brought out in this interesting article: “In a connected business reality, everyone in the ecosystem of your business is a customer: from employees and investors to partners, buyers and their networks, including the various players in the value chain from manufacturer to end consumer and back. In other words: all stakeholders.”

Customer Experience then is much more than achieving customer satisfaction. Everything a brand does play a part in forming the customer experience. A study by the Temkin group brought out that CX is made up of three components – success, effort, and emotion. The study showed that out of all the three, emotion played the most significant part. Affecting the emotions of customers through a concerted effort by the brand is what customer experience management is all about. Does it pay off? Definitely. As the study goes on to show, “companies that earn $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within 3 years of investing in customer experience.”

The benefits of Customer Experience extend to much more than revenue, though that is a pretty great factor in itself! A Walker study found that customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by the year 2020. This is of prime importance in brand transformation as the key goal of this transformation is to differentiate a business from its competitors and get ahead of them.

Related Reading: Find how Robotics and AI can help improve the customer experience

Ways to Enhance the Customer Experience

Ensuring that Customer Experience is the best it can get is a complete discipline in itself. Customer experience management (CEM or CXM) is the function that works towards streamlining every interaction between an organization and its customers. The goal is to foster brand loyalty in customers by ensuring that every touch point in the customer’s journey with the brand is satisfactory. The Customer Experience must be memorable and for the right reasons.

The most important factor in creating a good CX is to have a 360-degree view of customers.  Starting from there, the customer’s journey is optimized at every point to ensure a consistently positive experience. Consumer research, a thorough knowledge of market conditions, and an organization’s culture, vision and mission are some factors to keep in mind when designing a customer experience strategy for your business. This will ensure that the strategy takes into account all departments in the organization and not just those in customer-facing roles.

Customer Strategist Journal lists six key areas of the digital customer experience:

1. Reachability

2. Service convenience

3. Purchase convenience

4. Personalization

5. Simplicity and ease of use

6. Channel flexibility

If you notice, many of these key areas are linked to the channels used by customers. The Genesys State of Customer Experience research brings out that 83% of consumers say the ability to move from one assisted channel to another, such as moving from web chat to a live conversation, is desirable. However, only 50% of businesses support such cross-channel interactions. This is definitely something to be considered. Let’s look into this in detail.

Unlike a few years ago where customers would communicate with brands either through email, telephone or directly visiting the company, today’s connected customer has various channels at their disposal. Websites, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, and public forums are being used to contact and interact with brands. They expect customer service to be available and top notch in all these channels. This makes the brand transformation complicated, as delivering flawless customer service through every one of these platforms is challenging to say the least. If you fail, you know they are going to switch brands, which are available at the next click.

Channel Switching is another related challenge. For example, a customer could raise an issue through email and then request for escalation through a call and leave negative feedback on social media. The customer would expect the brand to be aware of his/her different interactions, respond and resolve the issue satisfactorily.

This challenge can be addressed with a few measures:

1. Centralization of interactions and data

   This gives all customer-facing executives the necessary information to deal with issue no matter which platform is used.

2. A unified stand

   The goal is to make the customer feel that it is one conversation, even if they are talking to different teams. This requires all teams to be equipped with the resources, information, and vision to show a unified stand and represent the brand consistently.

3. Engage with customers on their terms

   Customers prefer using different channels according to their convenience. They will not appreciate being directed to the channel that is convenient for the brand. This makes it important to identify and respond to them in their own terms.

Related Reading: Check out other blogs to know how a streamlined workflow can improve customer service.

Apart from addressing Channel Switching, there are a few important measures that brands need to keep in mind if they want to deliver a seamless and satisfactory Customer Experience. Here’s listing a few of them.

1. Go Mobile

   The Genesys report showed that “when interacting with a business for service and support, 78% of consumers surveyed use a mobile device. And that number jumps to 90% when working with millennials.” This makes it extremely important for brands to provide mobile-optimized solutions including apps, which focus on ease of access and interaction with the brand.

2. Weave CX into your entire structure

   The goal of Customer Experience must be all pervasive throughout the organization. A customer experience strategy must be designed and weaved into the core of your business. Your vision and mission must include this commitment. An example is Dell Computer. Their mission is “to be the most successful computer company in the world at delivering the best customer experience in the markets we serve.” Employees have this on their ID cards and every bulletin board in every office has a sign that reads “The Customer Experience: Own It.” 

3. Know your customers

   Understand your customer completely. Use technology to its fullest to derive insights into customer behavior and demographics. Getting detailed and actionable insights will help you plan your customer experience strategy effectively.   

Personalize! Personalize!

The most important aspect of getting your Customer Experience strategy right is personalization. Hyper-personalization is what the customer demands, and it is vital for brands to adopt measures to ensure this. At Fingent, we help brands build custom applications and solutions to achieve this for their customers. Let’s talk.

Do manufacturers need custom software solutions?

When Fingent started operations nearly two decades ago, we had the vision of helping organizations solve business challenges using technology. As we have helped numerous clients in the manufacturing as well as other industries, we have seen one thing – there isn’t a one-solution-fits-all software in the world that fits the needs of every organization. Each organization is unique.

While this is the most obvious benefit of custom software development, there are many other benefits that it brings to your organization. Let’s have a look at them in this blog.

How Custom Software Helps Manufacturers

Technology and software have become integral to the manufacturing industry. Irrespective of what the product is, manufacturers have recognized the role of good software in every aspect of their business. Right from design to implementation, production to shipping, employee management, to invoicing, and client relationship management (CRM) to predicting customer demand – there is no function that can run effectively without the help of good software. This makes software perhaps the most important element in your business. It stands to reason therefore that we consider in detail on which software suits your business best.

In that vein, let’s discuss the 5 benefits of custom software in manufacturing:

1. Better Production Planning and Control (or PPC)

In today’s competitive environment, lead times are getting shorter and price pressure is getting tougher. In addition, today’s consumers demand make-to-order manufacturing and hyper-personalized products. This is a tall order and requires highly optimized production processes, which focus on effectively allocating the internal resources of the company. This includes manpower, materials, and machines. Custom software will help you optimize processes more effectively than out-of-the-box software. This is because the software will be customized to include the right mix of resources and production needs, which are unique to your business.

2. Effective Monitoring of Machinery and Processes

Each manufacturer and product require precise process workflows and specifically calibrated machinery. Any change, however small, in the process or machinery can cause huge setbacks in production and eat away at your profits. A good custom software, which is specifically designed for your process flow and machinery, will help you track and monitor even slight changes. This will help you detect and rectify issues before they snowball into a major problem.  

3. Insightful Business Intelligence

With AI, IoT and machine learning adding exceptional capabilities to software, it has become possible to collect and process data to derive precise actionable insights. Business intelligence software helps managers have their finger on the pulse of every function in the organization and obtain an insight into the workings of the organization as a whole. These insights can be used to fine-tune inventory management, employee management, and other functions. Unique organization-specific data can be analyzed in real-time, allowing business leaders to make sound decisions without having to pour through lengthy and complex reports. Data mining, automated reporting, benchmarking and predictive analytics capabilities are features of Business Intelligence software, which are invaluable to manufacturers in achieving cost and time efficiencies as well as meet customer demand effectively.

4. Customer Relationship Management and Customer Service

With a custom CRM software for your manufacturing business, you can achieve better client relationship handling, faster responsiveness to customer demand and queries, and reduced customer dissatisfaction. Accurate Demand Forecasting helps manufacturers detect trends and cut the time from the concept phase to market delivery. This will ensure that you are keeping up with the competition and giving your customers exactly what they need. A custom CRM solution also helps figure process errors in real-time and ensure that the products are high-quality. It helps in creating an intelligent supply chain through insights into operations, order processing, inventory management, warehousing, and distribution chains. A CRM will also keep track of warranties, scheduled service calls, etc. to help serve customers better and maintain good customer relationships.

Related Reading: Find how custom software can benefit your business more.

Why Custom Software Is Better Than Off-The-Shelf Software

Although “custom” is often synonymous with “expensive,” this isn’t the case when it comes to custom software for your manufacturing business. The scalability, ease of integration and other benefits that come with custom software far outweigh the costs of initial investment. Some of the pros of custom software are:

1. Competitive Advantage

In today’s age when technology can be one of the most important competitive advantages, it is important to stand out from the crowd in this area. Using a mass-produced software gives you the same or lesser functionalities as your competitors.

2. Scalability

While off-the-shelf software might work for your start-up phase, these aren’t easily scalable, and the technology used could become obsolete with time. Custom software, on the other hand, can be designed to provide the scalability required for your individual business. This will help you have a solution that is perfect for your business while avoiding costs associated with major software overhauls every time a technology becomes obsolete.

3. Performance

Since off-the-shelf software aren’t customized for your business, they have many redundant features that you may never use for your business. This unnecessarily increases the amount of space required and load times, thereby decreasing performance. Custom software is sleek and only has the functionalities that your business requires. This makes it faster with improved performance.

Related Reading: Find how to make the right choice between off-shelf and custom software development.

Get Custom Software for Your Manufacturing Business

Despite knowing the benefits of custom software development, many manufacturers shy away from investing time and resources on this. They feel it is a daunting task considering the effort and resources needed to implement a custom solution. It need not be a difficult task at all however if you have the right help.

With decades of experience in custom software development, Fingent can help dismiss these fears. We help simplify the process for you, giving you the peace of mind to concentrate on your core business while we take care of the complete development and implementation. Get in touch with us to discuss more.

Video:  Custom Software Vs Off The Shelf – Dileep Jacob (Head of Operations, Fingent Corporation)

Why should businesses invest in custom software development?

The need to transform digitally has created a scenario where enterprises are constantly investing in new digital solutions to either make life easier for operations or help them explore new revenue streams in the digital space. However, there are a lot of misconceptions that prevail in the market with regards to digital solutions. As soon as a business announces that it is ready to invest in digital, they get bombarded with ready-to-deploy and off the shelf digital tools that are provided by several players in the tech industry.

But is investing in readily available solutions the best way to gain a foothold in digital adoption? Not always is what industry experts say. It is important for enterprises to invest in custom software development to empower their business growth with a more personalized digital arsenal. Several executives may argue that custom software development is a costly affair, but buying commercial off the shelf software could do more harm than good in the long run if it is not tailored to your objectives.

Here are 5 reasons why investing in custom software development is important for your enterprise.

1. Complexities in Systems Integration

Different areas of your business operations may find tools from different vendors to be useful. However, these tools may each have their own technology infrastructure requirements, architectural differences, different development methodologies and varying levels of implementation support. As an organization, your technology ecosystem needs to work as a streamlined single unit, capable of delivering value across your business.

For integrating systems from multiple vendors, a considerable effort is needed and this could outweigh the advantages offered by individual systems. Such a scenario calls for creating a suite of operational enterprise applications, custom made to fit the objectives of your business. Every custom software, thus built would follow common standards in development and execution, thereby creating a flexible and interoperable enterprise technology stack.

2. Scalability restrictions

Ready to deploy enterprise solutions are often advertised to be scalable for large workloads. But when unique requirements of your organization require flexibility beyond the scope defined by the software development company, then you are left with expensive software that cannot scale up with your business demand. This is another area where tailored and custom software development can be the game changer in your technology landscape.

Components of such software can be built keeping in mind the objectives specific to your business areas and not just a standard industry requirement. Hence, when scalability requirements arise, a custom built enterprise software will be able to accommodate your unique business and process workflows accordingly without creating new challenges for the teams handling your enterprise applications. This is vital for SMB’s as their growth ambitions would definitely require a scalable technology backend to support a critical business process.

3. Future proof innovations

Innovation is at the heart of every competitive business environment today. The more you innovate, the greater will be your chances of satisfying diverse consumer interests. When enterprises buy expensive and ready to deploy software from reputed vendors, they often limit their own dimensions of innovation. Such businesses are often forced to either wait till the software vendor comes up with the desired innovation or they may have to again purchase a new software if their existing application vendor is not in a position to add the new feature anytime soon.

Having your own custom software built will enable you to experiment and bring on board innovative concepts faster and without depending on other technology vendors to do it for you. This can help in greater market competence as your brand would be recognized as a forerunner rather than a late adopter for innovations that consumer’s desire.

4. Existing technology support

Many times, businesses invest in new digital solutions by blindly following trends in the market. It could be possible that the technology that they already have may just need a few tweaks and upgrades to provide the exact same or even better features that a totally new commercial off the shelf software can provide. Bringing a new digital solution from a vendor into your existing technology ecosystem can cause challenges not just in systems integration as mentioned above, but may also create instances where large effort is needed to maintain existing software that serves other core business processes.

When businesses go for custom software development, they have the liberty to build new capability on top of existing enterprise applications and hence saving considerable effort in development as well as reducing cost escalations. Having a team to customize existing software is a better alternative than engaging one to implement a third-party solution from scratch and then follow it up with expensive customizations to further suit your business requirements and objectives.

5. Compliance with standards and processes

Even the best of digital solutions from world-class vendors may have compliance issues with the standard rules and processes adopted within a business. The makers of such software may have included recommendations from industry recognized standards, but very often a business may have to think out of the box while running their daily operations. This leads to their core processes and standards being subjected to deviations from what the industry follows.

When third-party digital solutions are directly brought into such deviation prone business scenarios, there will be issues with compliance policies and standards. This is yet another scope for custom software development to take center stage and empower businesses with the flexibility to meet their unique compliance requirements. This is also true when government and other geopolitical influences require custom standard or compliance implementation rules to be followed by enterprise applications. Areas such as data privacy and consent management would be under multiple legal and judicial networks.  A region and a third-party digital solution may not be flexible to handle such variances.

Any technology implementation done today should be closely linked to business objectives, and enterprises need to have a clear idea on the business use cases that a particular technology could solve. With custom software development, it is possible to have a clear picture of the quantifiable value every investment in enterprise application development is made.

This will prove to deliver more ROI than a fully-fledged third-party digital solution implementation where your business may often be at the mercy of the vendor’s technology prowess. If technology is not your core forte, then you need to have the right advisory and consulting partner to help drive the most value out of your custom software development initiatives.

With years of empowering some of the world’s best businesses with custom software development, Fingent can be the right partner to help you build the technology backbone of your business. Get in touch with us to know more.

Imagine you are a salesman and you have logged into your system with the dashboard pulled up in front of you. Viewing the dashboard with a horde of information on it can turn out to be a very overwhelming experience. Bar charts, pies, metrics, numbers, arrows, percentages, ratios and what not go swimming in front of your eyes. Do they make any sense or do they end up confusing you? Does it include an intuitive interface allowing seamless navigation or is it cluttered and poorly organized? Well, it all depends on how well the sales dashboard is designed.

Recently, Fingent was approached by a client to develop a sales dashboard for their customers who are real estate agents and brokers. The requirement was to develop a portal for the agents and brokers to log into and a dashboard which gives a snapshot of their business performance. With this real estate platform, realtors should be able to access third-party applications to help them with the various stages of their business process.

Related Read: The Tech Disruptors in the Real Estate Space: What to Implement First?

Fig 1. Wireframe of Dashboard Designed for a Real Estate Agent

Fig 2. Sample Mockup Designed for a Real Estate Agent

In the real estate industry, data is often unstructured and unaccounted. This platform allows agents to prospect leads, manage and follow up on them, view the status, close on them and ultimately account for the costs and commissions.

Fig 3. Wireframe of  Dashboard Designed for a Real Estate Broker

Fig 4. Mockup Template Created for a Real Estate Broker

Expectations from a Good Sales Dashboard

A well-designed sales dashboard is like a good storyteller. It tells you a story complete with the setting, the characters, the main plot, the conflicts, and a conclusion. This should all flow in a seamless, logical way as the eyes of the user move from the top of the dashboard to the bottom; gauging information, which is crucial to making accurate decisions.

Salespeople usually juggle with a lot of numbers. They have numbers related to revenue, sales pipeline, products and services, customer base, forecasts, financial data etc. These numbers help them analyze and make critical decisions on the next move to steer their business forward to success. If these numbers are all scattered around, a salesperson may end up spending precious time gathering data and in the process slip on making important decisions.

Now, imagine if all these numbers come across as a story. Accordingly, the salesperson is able to quickly view the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of their business, make a conclusion and plan for the next moves. That is what a good sales dashboard aims to achieve.

A good sales dashboard gives an unbiased true picture of the day to day workings of one’s business. It provides an illustrated view of KPIs and other information crucial in the sales process.

Related Read: Ok Seriously, How Important Is Data Visualization?

Besides, a well-designed sales dashboard should also offer access to real-time data. With this real-time data, salespeople can continually monitor the sales pipeline and activities for making crucial decisions.

The design is yet another leading factor in ensuring better user experience. The logical arrangement of the metrics and other information contribute to effortless navigation all the while ensuring that the most important information is accessed first.

Designing a Sales Dashboard

Now, on the other hand, designing a sales dashboard is an equally daunting task. How do we represent all those numbers in a visually pleasing and logical manner? Furthermore, which numbers to choose from the many, that would ultimately matter the most to the client.

Keeping in mind the following tips will help you design an effective sales dashboard.

1. Getting Your Story Right

A good understanding of the client’s business and its KPIs will help you build the story. Identifying the pulse of the business by tapping on which will give you a correct understanding of the business’s lifeline is the key. Following are some metrics that are generally used in sales –

• Revenue 

This is the key indicator denoting how well the business is doing. Revenue is compared over time (monthly, quarterly, yearly) or with the projected versus actual revenue.  It can also be compared to the costs and expressed as a return on investment (ROI). Another way of representing it is to show profits after all the costs are deducted from the revenue. Finding out from your clients which figure would best be useful to them will help you in the design.

• Forecast

  The client can integrate a system to predict their future sales and revenue based on their past backlog, current pipeline, employee performances, market conditions etc. Showing this data on the dashboard will help them see the direction their business is taking.

• Sales in Numbers and Value

From where is all the revenue coming? Is it from just one product or are all the departments making enough sales? These questions can be answered by displaying the sales in numbers and value. This will give more clarity on the inner workings of the client’s business.

• Sales Pipeline

 The sales pipeline reflects the number of deals in each stage of the sales process. The stages can be open leads, qualified leads, face to face meetings, proposal stage, and closed deals. The number of deals in each stage will help the salesman asses whether they have enough incoming leads to sustain their business, and also whether they have an appropriate distribution of deals to meet their sales targets. It also helps in forecasting revenue in the near future.

• Lost Deals or Backlog

Negative metrics such as the number of lost deals or the backlog from the previous financial cycle, on the dashboard help in critical decision making. It can tell the salesman where their business is lacking and what it is that they need to focus on.

• Conversion Ratios

Conversion ratios tell the efficiency of the various stages in the sales process. Numbers such as these – the ratio of open leads to qualified leads, the ratio of qualified leads to closed deals, the ratio of open leads to closed deals etc. help in understanding where the work is getting piled and identifying the bottlenecks faced in the business.

• Attention Required/Overdue items

Salespeople would appreciate if they can get hold of a list of items on the dashboard, which needs their immediate attention. Overdue tasks is another area which needs to be highlighted in the day to day functioning of the business.

• Performance

 A metric that reflects the sales effectiveness or achievements of a salesperson in line with the company strategy and targets would summarize their performance and also act as a motivating factor to push them towards achieving more.  

2. Making Data Comparisons for Deriving Insights

One can gather meaningful insights from data when a comparison is made. Therefore, the way these metrics get compared side by side to derive a logical conclusion is downright important.

Should the metrics be compared with respect to each other? For example actual revenue against forecasted, lost deals versus won deals, sales backlog against the pipeline etc.

Or should it be compared with respect to time? Daily, weekly, quarterly, year on year, year to date etc. Making a comparison should ultimately help the salesperson answer the right questions.

3. Building your Story on Actual Data

Getting real-time data is really helpful in determining the best way of representing it. If it is fictional data, then one must stick to keeping the proportions right. Each chart has a specific type of data that it represents. For example, a pie is used to represent parts of a whole, a funnel represents a progression and a line displays variation over time of different series.

When you use actual data, you tend to realize that some charts do not look as good as you expected and maybe you should think about representing it in some other way. Or, that some numbers are better off shown as numbers itself and not compared to other figures as part of a chart, because it might end up skewing the chart in one direction.

4. Following General UI/UX Principles

Following the general UI/UX principles of good design makes the dashboard visually pleasing and easily navigable. Since most people read from left to right and top to bottom, aligning the widgets on the dashboard in the same order as the story progresses, helps in seamless navigation. The top left space on the dashboard is where the eye falls first. Placing the most important piece of information there ensures high visibility.

Leaving enough white spaces and keeping the dashboard uncluttered will help the user assimilate the information better. A sales dashboard should be concise with just the right amount of information for the salesperson to make an assessment of their business.

5. Keep Reinventing

Nobody gets it right the first time. Redesigning the dashboard a couple of times gives you a better perspective each time and helps you discover the one which will ultimately win your client’s heart.

Related Read: Make Your Data Visualization go Viral: 10 Quick Tips

Wrapping Up

Bringing things into perspective or distilling the essence from a mix of information is what a sales dashboard is all about. Companies have been relying on such visual representations to get an overview of what needs to be done. Particularly in the area of sales, such close visualizations of a range of data can indeed prove helpful for salespeople to gauge information as it is intended and make decisions crucial to the sales process. Owing to its importance, it is downright necessary to build and design a sales dashboard in accordance with certain principles.

By taking into consideration the key metrics that define the sales process, it is possible to delineate the entire workflow and pipeline to an easily identifiable visual form. Such a dashboard brings more clarity in the process, enabling salespeople to understand and apply the necessary changes. We did just that with our client by formulating an effective sales dashboard. This would ultimately help them leverage sales data to contrive practices that push their business forward, all the while accelerating efficiency and ROI.

With the Industrial Internet, Industry 4.0, industrial robots and more, the manufacturing sector is seeing sweeping reforms in their processes and core functions. These reforms are making them faster, bigger and better and all of this has been possible because of digital transformation.

Digital transformation has changed the face of the manufacturing industry. From behemoth machinery and an army of workers, manufacturers have transformed themselves to a sleek, modern and more efficient entity. This blog will explore how digital transformation has made that possible. We will also see the most important digital trends in the manufacturing industry.

The Importance of Digital Transformation in Manufacturing

Change has been constant in the manufacturing industry. Right from the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s to today’s Industry 4.0, the manufacturing sector has had to adapt to the changes in political climates, economic upheavals, and technology. As technology fast forwards in our times, it is imperative that manufacturers keep up. The only way they can prepare their businesses for the digital revolution of our day is through digital transformation. Here are a few ways in which digital transformation is benefitting the manufacturing industry.

1. Keeping up with Customer Demands

A recent Harvard Business Review study of 75,000 people, showed that the most important factor in building customer loyalty towards an organization is the reduction of effort. Be it in collecting information on products, customer service or getting their needs met faster and more effectively, customers value the path of least effort. This is where the speed of innovation comes in. Manufacturers need to create products that are software-enabled and connected, and they must do this before anybody else!

A digital factory design where development, production, and other cycles aren’t siloed is imperative to this. Digitalization makes it possible for all these cycles to work in tandem and innovate much faster.  The vision of a “smart factory” is that it can make critical product decisions about customer demand, design, material selection, scheduling and pricing, all in one process. This would speed up innovation, create personalized products and enhance the overall customer experience exponentially.

2. Refining Processes

Manufacturing is largely a process-driven industry, so there is an incredible amount of focus on process refinement. Digital transformation makes this possible in many ways. Automation of processes is a major step in that direction. This reduces manual errors, helps automatically detect production inefficiencies, allows for the pre-testing of new ideas more economically and helps optimize the performance of workers.

Predictive disruption analytics, KPI monitoring, and other digitally enabled tools help in refining processes as they are happening. This allows manufacturers to identify weaknesses and make improvements quickly. Machine Learning enables instructions and intelligence to be built into the machines as they are developed and deployed. As these machines are intuitive, they learn from the environment and aid in the continuous process refinement.

3. Revenue Gains and Cost Reduction

A PwC survey of over 2,000 participants from companies in nine major industrial sectors and 26 countries, predicts that Industry 4.0 will drive $493B in revenue gains and $ 421B in cost reductions globally by 2020.

These numbers are realized by the many opportunities brought in by digital transformation. The digitization and integration of vertical and horizontal value chains help bring a cohesive focus to the organization’s processes and production. The creation of new digitized products with analytical capabilities and integrating new methods of data collection and analysis helps manufacturers understand and cater to the needs of customers more effectively. Disruptive digital business models allow for a more agile approach throughout the organization and thus optimizes performance and cost. All this and more contribute to significant cost reductions and an increase in revenue.

Digital Transformation Trends in Manufacturing

Different technologies have opened up a wide area of possibilities in the manufacturing industry. Here are 3 Trends that are doing wonders in the manufacturing space.

1. IoT And Industry 4.0

61% of enterprises say that the “Internet of Things (IoT) plays a role in their digital business strategies with manufacturing and high-tech leading all other industries.” The manufacturing industry is evidently recognizing the critical impact of IoT in gaining a competitive edge. In 2016 alone, IoT, accounting for more than $178 billion in revenue. There are many avenues where IoT has helped streamline and simplify manufacturing processes. It is also a key component of Industry 4.0 and enables connected devices. This allows for the streamlining of internal operations and the optimization of products and operations through insights from the cloud.

Industry 4.0 has also made possible the trend of mass customization, which is characterized by a better and more effective response to the demands of customers. Connectedness and mobility have led to faster innovation and response. Logistics and supply chains have also benefited greatly from this connectedness.

Related Reading: Find how IoT is reshaping industries. 

2. Machine Learning 

Machine Learning has elevated the processes and operations of the manufacturing industry in many ways. A PwC study entitled Digital Factories 2020: Shaping the future of manufacturing showed that the adoption of machine learning and analytics by manufacturers to improve predictive maintenance is predicted to increase in the next five years by 38%. Advanced machine learning algorithms are able to identify and implement improvements in processes and operations, thus leading to reduced costs and increased revenue.

A study by The World Economic Forum (WEF) discussed how manufacturers are recognizing the ability to combine emerging technologies including IoT, AI, and machine learning to improve asset tracking accuracy, supply chain visibility, and inventory optimization. Thus, in various ways, Machine Learning is greatly contributing to lowering the cost of production, improving the speed of innovation and operations and enhancing the customer experience by accurately identifying and meeting customer demands.

Related Reading: Check out this infographic to learn more on the disruptive innovation: Machine Learning.

3. Advanced Robotics

Robotics is no more confined to the realms of accomplishing repetitive assembly line tasks. Robots are now intuitive, trainable and have the ability to mimic human attributes of dexterity and critical thinking. This makes them a formidable force in manufacturing.

Robots with advanced sensors and collaborative ability are now being deployed in hazardous environments to collect information and data pertinent to the manufacturing industry’s needs. This contributes greatly to providing safe working environments for humans. Apart from the physical robotic machines, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has also grown in importance. RPA goes a step above and beyond physical tasks and replicates human thinking ability and transforms processes and operations to the next level. Recently, the term ‘cobot’ was coined by professors at Northwestern University in America. This underlines the significant progress in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) where robots are now able to collaborate with humans in the workspace.

Related Reading: Read on to know how robotic process can help accelerate business growth.

Owning Digital Transformation

There can be no doubt that digital transformation is the way to go if manufacturers want to keep up with competition and stay relevant. Capitalizing on these digital trends for your business need not be a daunting task. At Fingent, we help manufacturers make sense of digital transformation and adopt it successfully. We can help you make a success of your digital transformation. Get in touch with us and see how.