Tag: digital business transformation
Attaining Digital Transformation Success with AIOps
Your IT infrastructure is the key pillar of your organization and this dependency will only increase steadily in future. You need help to cope with this massive dependency, and digital transformation will play a crucial role in this. Now, in order to make your digital transformation successful, you need something powerful, radical and looking up to the next-gen. That is what AIOps is.
Related Reading: How Digital Innovation Transformed Today’s Business World
This blog will discuss how organizations can apply AIOps to drive digital transformation and make your IT operations a success for the future of your business.
Defining AIOps and Its Crucial Role
AIOps was initially used by Gartner in 2017 as an acronym for Artificial Intelligence for IT operations. AIOps is a beautiful synchronization of machine learning, analytics, and AI. These technologies are brought together in order to derive meaning from massive datasets. It pools all kinds of data gathered from different sources and uses advanced AI and ML operations to enhance a wide range of IT operations. The insights derived are far beyond what human analysis could achieve.
As IT infrastructure is becoming progressively complex with the demands of digital transformation, this potential of AIOps is becoming critical to successful IT development. Traditional methods of managing your complex infrastructure could increase your costs, create maintenance issues and increase possibilities of slowdowns. AIOps can equip your IT teams to overcome such problems, trends, and slowdowns. It allows your teams to prioritize and focus on the most important information while AIOps reduces normal alert noises and identifies patterns automatically without human input.
Related Reading: How IT-as-a-Service Boost the Digital Transformation of Enterprises
In fact, AIOps is becoming a necessity for every organization. Gartner predicts that 30% of large enterprises will adopt AIOps by 2023. According to another research, AIOps platform market is expected to grow to $11.02 billion by 2023. Hence, the question larger organizations should ask themselves is not “if” they need to adopt AIOps, but “when.”
How is AIOps Driving Digital Transformation?
Since digital transformation includes cloud adoptions, quick change and implementation of new technologies, it requires a shift in focus. Instead of users struggling with traditional services and performance management strategies and tools, AIOps offers organizations a perfect model to handle digital transformation. It can help your team to manage the speed, scale, and complexity of changes, which are the key challenges of digital transformation.
Here are some essential steps to effective AIOps:
1. Act Fast
Timing is everything in business and hesitation in the adoption of technologies can set you back more than you can imagine. Even if you feel that you aren’t ready to adopt AIOps yet, read about it and familiarize yourself with the vocabulary and capabilities of AIOps. It will help you make an informed decision when it is the right time.
2. Start Small
All in or all out doesn’t necessarily apply to digital transformation. Starting small could actually prove beneficial to your organization. This would mean that you focus on what is practical and achievable. Your initial use cases could include application performance monitoring, dynamic baselining, predictive event management, and event-driven automation.
3. Restructure Your Team
Successful adoption of AIOps might require restructuring the roles of your team. This would ensure that the best resources are used for the right jobs. Also, identify experience gaps and fill those gaps by providing the necessary training.
Related Reading: Fingent Speaks: What it Takes to Build a Successful Digital Transformation Strategy
4. Leverage Available Resources
Your organization might already have data and analytic resources. Since these teams are already skilled in data management, their skill set can be effectively leveraged for AIOps.
5. Increase Proficiency by Developing Core Capabilities
Developing core capabilities such as machine learning, open data access, and big data can prove beneficial. For example, the massive amount of data generated by digital transformation can be overwhelming. Since the AIOps platform must support responsive ad-hoc data exploration and deep queries, developing this capability can also help you build up progress towards the use of AIOps.
6. Track Business Value
Make sure that the value of AIOps is tied to your overall business objective. The key performance indicators must correlate with best practices and should remain measurable. Ensure that your business is able to obtain a complete and referenceable history of such values.
What Is Your Plan of Action?
AIOps might be taking its first steps, but it is what will eventually drive your digital transformation with unmatched speed and stability. Selecting the right use cases might be challenging initially and might require significant process reengineering. Fingent top custom software development company, can help you get there. Call us to find out more.
The transformative impact of blockchain remains much underestimated. While the concept is now associated with Bitcoins, the underlying technology could very well become the most important disruption since the arrival of Internet.
Blockchain in its purest essence is a distributed database, containing digital data. Users may access, inspect, or add to the data, but cannot change or delete it, making it tamper-proof. The original information remains as it is, leaving behind a trail, or a chain of transactions. Any single transaction would be a “block” in a never-ending chain, with the chain distributed across the internet, outside the control of anybody. Businesses leveraging block chains have an easier and safer mechanism to conduct transactions.
How Viable is Blockchain in the Supply Chain?
One area where blockchain technology is in the throes of making a big disruption is the supply chain of industries. In the existing system, the database is updated every time a movement or change takes place in the supply chain. With blockchain, every time a product changes hands, the transaction is documented, creating a permanent history of a product, from the point of origin to sale. In a traditional supply chain, each stakeholder maintains their respective records. With block chain, the records are distributed across the cyberspace, allowing for smart contracts. The distributed database runs on multiple servers, constantly checking the security and integrity of each transaction.
The application of blockchain technology in supply chain manifest in many ways:
- Real-time live recording of the quantity and transfer of assets, such as trailers, pallets, and containers
- Continuous tracking purchase orders, receipts, shipment related notifications, and other trade-related documents
- Assigning digital labels to physical goods, such as bar codes, serial numbers, RFID tags, and more. Blockchain allows connecting digital product information such as the source of origination details, batch numbers, factory and processing data, expiration dates, storage temperatures and shipping detail in a robust and inseparable way.
Improved Transparency
Blockchain brings about greater transparency in the supply chain. The log reveals the origins and touch points of each product, disseminating information on the manufacturing process, movements, and delivery, to all stakeholders. Such in-depth and finer details are not easily available now, and the potential applications of such transparency are earth-shattering:
- For perishable commodities, such as fish, blockchain records for each process, such as how and when the fish was caught or raised, whether it has been handled in a compliant manner, whether harmful formaldehyde was used in storing it, and more, increases consumer confidence and safety manifold. Walmart’s new Food Safety Collaboration Center in Beijing, where the company tied up with IBM and Tsinghua University to apply blockchain technology, to ensure food supply chain traceability and authenticity is a case in point.
- Blockchain logs make explicit the genuineness of a product, as in whether the product is really organic as claimed.
- An audit of blockchain logs make explicit whether the product was made using child labor, whether workers were paid fair wages, and whether there are any other ethically and/or legally reprehensible associations.
- Blockchain logs enhance safety. For instance, customers can track the components in their vehicle has come from an authorized manufacturer and has passed all recommended tests, increasing confidence, and reducing the risk of injury.
- In the case of defective products, the trial makes it easy to pinpoint the source of the problem and make effective amends. For instance, Blockchain production records enable tracing the place and time when a specific automobile airbags were made, allowing automakers to reduce their liability.
The trust and transparency that block chain infuses across the value chain become a new nexus for value exchange.
Security
One major impact of blockchain in the supply chain is improved security and accountability.
- The chain of logs ensures the authenticity of the product, and customers can verify the same automatically. With transactions tracked from the origin, a duplicate product or an unauthorized transaction is immediately flagged as counterfeit or theft.
- The permanent registry and verification assign tamper-proof individual identifiers to high-value products such as jewelry, making theft easily attributable. It also helps identify insurance fraud, which is a $60 billion industry in the USA.
- Blockchain serves as an escrow account, requiring all parties to confirm transactions. It eliminates the need for third parties, usually involved in the mix to ensure both parties honor their part of the contract. A shared, indelible ledger with codified rules also eliminates the need for audits.
The blockchain is on its way to enable more agile and secure value chains, with closer cooperation among stakeholders.
Process Improvements
The application of block chain in supply chain contributes greatly to process improvements.
- Blockchain logs make it very easy to detect errors or problems, and subject the supply chain movements to analytics to improve efficiency, on a dynamic basis. It also facilitates effective planning to improve processes.
- Blockchain delivers a decentralized architecture, which creates opportunities to innovate. For instance, intelligent block chain contracts query other nodes in the blockchain for the best pricing, delivery times, and other particulars. Smart shippers are already finding ways to leverage innovations to increase profits and strengthen relationships across the supply chain.
The application of blockchain technology enables tapping into rules-based intelligence, for executing business functions. Stakeholders may apply intelligent program code to embed conditions and other logic into contracts and other transactions, implemented automatically, with 100% accuracy. Manufacturers and other stakeholders can spare themselves of the copious amount of time, money, and other resources they presently spend to negotiate and communicate with other stakeholders.
The effectiveness of blockchain technology, however, depends not on blindly applying the technology per se, but developing solid and reliable apps that leverage the technology. The blockchain is only a facilitator, and it still requires cutting edge mobility solutions to power your supply chain to greater heights. Get in touch with a reliable partner for your business and mobility solutions requirements.
Digital technologies have permeated and disrupted almost all sectors, and logistics companies are no exception.
Optimization and efficiency, combined with speed and seizing the moment are the keys to success in today’s highly competitive advantage. Technology is the key enabler allowing companies to realize these aspects.
Leveraging Technology for Strategic Planning
A report by transport and logistics analysts Oliver Wyman reveals transportation and logistics companies increasing revenue, yet having reduced profits, over a 10-year period, and come with the recommendation to “standardize and streamline structures and processes, developing industry oriented and innovative solutions, thinking and acting in terms of networks.” Technology is the key enabler in this regard.
On average, transportation companies invest about 5% of their annual revenues in digital operations, with the main focus on digitizing their customer interface. The thrust these days is especially on mobile apps and solutions, to offer a personalized experience for their customers, and track the movement of vehicles accurately. However, side-by-side companies are also increasingly using digital technology to unlock new business models, focused on the creation of value-added services and innovative solutions.
The Use of Big Data to Improve Operations
The need to cut cost and take real-time action, in a competitive environment where margins are wafer thin, require logistics companies to take greater control over their supply chain and ensure the processes take place seamlessly, at great speed. Towards such ends, logistics companies are increasingly applying Big Data technology, to capture and analyze data, to streamline their operations and optimize the supply chain.
Computers apply algorithms to crunch Big Data, unlocking insights and opportunities not possible before. Such insights enable streamlining operations and optimization of the supply chain.
- Data based automation, especially automated load building and optimizing the inbound and outbound movement of cargo, enable optimal usage of available resources, reduction of waste, and facilitate lean operations.
- Effective real-time fleet management solution facilitates “uberization” of trucks and other delivery vehicles, where empty containers may be utilized immediately by matching it to the nearest load. Mobile solutions enable greater transparency into the operations.
- A comprehensive data based inventory and supply chain management system unlocks silos, and facilitates end-to-end visibility to inventory, orders and shipments across the supply chain. Such transparency allows improved tracking of inventory movement, facilitates the reduction of network-wide inventory levels, and enable managers to respond dynamically and in real-time to any events or issues that disrupt or hinder the supply chain.
- Analytical data makes explicit greenhouse emissions and carbon footprints of truck and machinery operations, allowing companies to take steps to become carbon-neutral, thereby contributing to the cause of “Green logistics.”
- The combination of machine learning with supply chain management enables turning reams of passive data into actionable business intelligence. Logistics companies apply the wealth of data related to the movement of their goods and trucks to identify patterns related to customer trends, identify what works well, unearth market insights, and gain competitive advantage.
Digital Improves Security
Supply chain disruption is the number one global business risk for logistics companies. Technology enables fortifying the supply chain in many ways.
- Digital locks make the inventory more secure, offer a robust layer of security, in addition to physical security.
- Optimal route planning, combined with real-time tracking of cargo movement through mobile apps enable routing of cargo by avoiding congestion points and trouble spots, to minimize risks and interruption.
Internet of Things (IoT) Enhances Operations
The earliest applications of RFID and nascent IoT technology have been in asset tracking and warehouse management. For instance, rather than simply tracking inventory of pallets and crates, enterprises use sensors, beacons, RFID and other technology to gather information on the state of the connected item, such as when the “thing” requires maintenance, the expected life of the “thing,” and more.
IoT contributes to highly integrated warehouse management solutions, enabling precision movement and accurate tracking of movement of goods. The applications of IoT instruments in logistics are virtually endless, ranging from tracking transportation goods in a temperature controlled way to ensuring the correct package reaches the correct location at the specified time and more.
The trends in the immediate future include connected and ‘autonomous’ trucks, warehouse robotics, and smart warehouse solutions, all of which will improve efficiency manifold, speed up operations, and improve accuracy.
Technological Innovations Unlock New Possibilities
Logistics companies use technology not just to improve efficiency of operations, but also transform the way operations take place in itself. The use of robots in large warehouses, and to handle hazardous goods is already widespread, as is the driverless, remote-controlled vehicles.
The next big thing is the use of drones, especially for last mile delivery. The U.S. Government is already piloting a drone-based traffic monitoring system. Countries such as Spain, France, and The Czech Republic and others have several research projects looking into the use of drones for traffic management. The widespread use of drones would speed up things considerably, reduce the hassles, strain and inefficiency associated with maintaining an army of delivery boys, and also reduce costs considerably.
A start has already been made, with Amazon Prime Air already making legit deliveries using drones, in less than 30 minutes from the time customers place an order. When the technology becomes widespread, logistics will change like never before.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Proactive transportation and logistics companies go beyond improving their operational efficiency and retaining greater control over their operations, to enhance customer satisfaction.
Technology propels a shift to a customer obsessed operating model, enabling the delivery of personalized and customer-focused logistics, with faster cycle times.
Hyper-connectivity facilitates not just big data, but also speed data. Speed and timeliness, manifesting in seizing the moment enable companies to match customer expectations and deliver competitive differentiation over its competitors.
It requires considerable expertise in both business operations and the latest cutting edge technology to roll out successful technological solutions acceptable by the rank and file. By partnering with us, you can piggy-bank on our vast and extensive experience in delivering highly intuitive apps and other solutions for transportation and logistics firms. Our rich talent pool, combined with extensive experience allow us to add value to your strategy, and roll out seamless apps that make your processes highly efficient, allowing you to cut costs, unlock new possibilities, and take customer satisfaction to new levels.
Many businesses regard IT as a cost center, not offering any tangible returns for the dollar spend. Such reasoning may seem misplaced in today’s tech-centric age where more and more people are online, and technology creeps into almost all business processes. However, such misgivings may not be off the mark when factoring in the current state of IT in many enterprises.
Enterprises need to apply technology solutions the right way to realize potential gains from IT, with a coherent technology strategy for realizing business goals. This is a far cry from the present reality in many organizations where IT, rather than fulfilling its anticipated role as a key business enabler, is caught in a “process trap,” and a spending black hole.
Adopt these strategies to ensure IT investments create value.
Leverage Technology Solutions to Optimize Resources
It is a dog fight out there for new customers, in today’s highly competitive business environment. Most businesses are under stress to improve their margins. Margins can improve by increasing revenue, which is tough, and by reducing expenditure, which technology solutions can enable.
Automating manual tasks, doing away with time-consuming and man-hour intensive processes is among the core mandate of software. Reducing operational costs by eliminating waste and inefficiency, reducing cycle times, accurate invoicing, and more, all brought about by automation and process improvements, adds direct value, and contribute tangibly to the bottom line.
Today’s enterprises can further go beyond such basics, and leverage emerging technologies such as BYOD, big data and mobility solutions to offer technology solutions that empower the workforce to collaborate anytime, anywhere, with seamless access to data. Such interventions streamline day to day activities, and increase productivity. Marketing automation alone offers a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. Application of technology solutions to other areas would realize similar, if not greater, gains
The cloud, with its scalable subscriptions, offer scope for big savings, sparing enterprises the hassles and costs of setting up their costly on-premises servers and other solutions, more so when demand for such resources may be seasonal. Companies could move workloads such as web and email to cloud hosts to overcome the network bandwidth challenges they face.
Enhance Security
IT has the potential to add direct value in security and regulatory compliance front as well. Using software to cross-check whether various checks and balances are in place to ensure compliance reduces the drag on available resources. Aggregating data from various sources to generate compliance reports automatically allow the workforce to focus more on their core activities. Over and above such regulatory mandates, developing an effective network strategy, complete with encryption, network monitoring, and other protocols, as appropriate, keeps the network safe from data thieves, intellectual property bandits, ransomware gangs, and threats of various hues lurking in the cyberspace.
Non-compliance and breach can attract huge fines, besides other damages. Breaches cost global companies $3.79 million, and 60% of business closes within six months of a major data breach. Adopting a technology strategy on this front offers an effective safeguard against such disasters.
Promote Innovation
A big drag with IT is a huge slice of the budget, as high as 70% to 80%, invariably spend on maintaining existing assets, leaving very little on the table for innovation and transformational activities.
A break-out from this logjam require widening the focus to explore new technology, new products, new vendors, and new partners, aimed at identifying new solutions that enable the company overcome historic barriers of cost and geography. At the very least, focus on discovering newer cost-effective solutions and delivery channels to replace incumbent solutions. The added bonus with such efforts may be solutions to break into new markets or leapfrog competitors.
In other words, reposition the technology strategy from the usual “on-demand service provider,” to IT becoming a strategic partner in the company’s quest for innovation and growth.
Invest in Transformational Capabilities
New and emerging technologies such as cloud computing, big data, analytics, IoT, and more offer scope for not just transforming business processes, but also for unlocking new business opportunities. For instance, deploying analytic tools that generate deep insight from transaction data makes marketing more efficient, while deploying predictive analytic tools to anticipate customer needs enables marketers to go one-up on competition and increase sales.
However, businesses would also do well to be aware that there’s a lot of snake oil being sold in the form of new technologies and strike partnerships with established and credible solution providers. We offer a host of cutting-edge technology solutions that allow your business to become more efficient, and your workforce to become more productive. Partner with us to formulate a technology strategy that would ensure your IT investments truly add value, and transform your business.
If you thought “digitizing” your business was all about incorporating some kind of technology into your processes, and that replacing your people and papers with technology would do the trick, then you are in for some new information. That’s right.
Digital business transformation has more to it than you probably imagined. It is more about doing things in different ways and producing new and improved business designs, all with the common goal of blurring the lines between the physical and virtual worlds.
Digitization is not just dehumanizing or mechanizing work
Most people understand digitization to be either an extension of automation or pretty much the same thing. But according to Gartner, the goal of digitization is to create and deliver new value to customers and not just improving the quality of already existing services.
For example in a hospital, nurses and doctors use clipboards and forms for access to patient details, to jot down further medicine details and the like. Merely replacing these paper forms with tablets and other devices is not digitization in itself. Internally, there are improvements in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, when compared to paper-based manual transcription and for patients too, the quality of already existing care is improved.
Though there are a thousand benefits to the entire health organization by doing just that, like better accuracy and speed while entering data into the Electronic Health Record systems, it does not actually count for digitization as here the patients do not experience any additional value.
Instead, what if the entire care and control system is redesigned with the help of smart machines and the Internet of Things (IoT)?
The smart devices can be programmed to do most of the data collection, analysis and monitoring of the patients themselves, which leaves only the talking, the touching and empathizing to be done by the nurses – basically what we humans do best. The devices can monitor the patient’s health conditions continuously and keep checking for any vital signs of discomfort or variations, and alert the nurses and doctors well ahead in case of an issue.
Technologies like, hands-free conversational interfaces, can be used for data entry in hospitals, rather than typing in the data manually, thereby utilizing what comes naturally to human beings to make work easier. All these technologies help them in being proactive in their approach, thereby delivering more effective care and the end result is thus, better outcome for the patients as well as the doctors.
So, it is evident now, that digitization is not just dehumanizing or mechanizing work. It is rather a way or means for people to go back to their more “natural state”.
Digitization is not just dehumanizing or mechanizing work. It is rather a way or means for people to go back to their more “natural state”
Letting humans revert to what they are best at
With all the smart devices that can think for themselves in place, you might wonder, “so what is the need for people or what is our role in an organization?”
It is not about completely eliminating people from the scenario or taking them out of the processes. It is more about redefining their roles and getting them to do what they are best at. That way, they don’t have to be stalled with other tasks like data entry and paperwork, that bring down their efficiency and productivity.
Janelle Hill, vice president and analyst at Gartner says, “We now have the ability to use machines to support and augment people to help them realize their potential, not have them bogged down in paperwork and systems data entry. We need to think about how to identify the right work for the people.”
A digital business environment provides innumerous opportunities for innovation and improvements, which can help organizations in winning over customers with additional value and gaining the competitive advantage. Such value though, can be created only through a complete rethinking and redesigning of work itself. People need to be assigned work they are good at, while leaving the rest to be done by the smart machines. Thus, the full value of digitization can only be achieved through proper definition of work and not merely by inserting digital technologies into the existing processes.
“People need to be assigned work they are good at, while leaving the rest to be done by the smart machines. Thus, the full value of digitization can only be achieved through proper definition of work and not merely by inserting digital technologies into the existing processes.”
Source: Gartner