The need for speed
Businesses today are being empowered by artificial intelligence (AI) to grow in ways that they could only dream of just a few years prior. The data on increasing use of AI demonstrates that turning to such automated solutions is, arguably, the equivalent of taking your vitamins – those making the strongest impact have already begun investing in a complete digital transformation journey. As global business becomes increasingly more complex, we must adapt to keep the health of our businesses at peak performance. Much like a routine medical check-up, assessing the health of your business processes will inform you on how best to nurture it in its entirety.
Speed and precision are among the top concerns for companies looking to streamline and extract value from mountains of data that contribute to overcomplexity and unpredictability. How can you be precise if you don’t have the full picture? McKinsey’s survey on post-pandemic strategies points to the starkly apparent trend of developing stronger digital strategies to make room for better analysis, creative decision-making, and input from new talent. The highest performing companies are the ones making the boldest decisions to support their digital transformation journey so they can harness stronger production and performance capabilities. Doing so freed up their time and resources to strengthen their team, one of the many benefits of mobilizing your business and planning at a quicker, sharper pace.
Companies that utilize adaptable modeling can enable turnkey solutions for finance, sales, and workforce planning. Through machine learning predictions, your business can improve the quality and speed of human decision-making, especially as your business grows and develops over time. Growth can come with additional responsibilities and creative tasks that machine learning can thankfully make available to your team, which can leave you with more room and resources to explore new business pursuits.
What does better adaptability through automation in strategic planning look like out in the wild? We can observe the success of the Dubai-based Shelf Drilling, which has been enabled to spend more time on significant business and financial operations by introducing an adaptable solution that reduced their wait time for the transferring and consolidation of data by an impressive 98%. No one needs to question whether they have access to the latest version of data, which empowers them to formulate and execute faster and more effective business strategies.
Employing new technological solutions throughout the digital transformation of your business does not mean ditching what is familiar. In fact, striking the right balance between incorporating modern tech solutions while preserving simplicity has the advantage of enhancing user experience, and thereby making the implementation process not only easier, but more likely to have a long-lasting impact on business performance. The reason? Many who do not envision what the user experience will be when using new solutions may overlook the negative impact it can have on the speed and precision of their planning and operations.
Tap into your strengths. Taking inventory of the existing skill sets of your workforce is necessary on the road to digital transformation. Businesses can leverage their expertise in programs already in use like Excel to design, implement, and manage a solution that can efficiently forecast and plan initiatives at scale. Heiniger, a leading Swiss manufacturer of animal shearing equipment, sought out a flexible solution to navigate ever-increasing analysis requirements, which began to affect the accessibility of key information in crucial tasks. However, a key priority for them in their digital transformation was to keep processes user-friendly and capable of integrating with existing systems. By looking into ways in which they could integrate data without sacrificing ease-of-use, Heiniger has been able to profit with their powerful yet simplified planning. Placing emphasis on a smooth implementation and user experience can re-energize operations that have begun to feel unwieldy.
Through effective integration of diverse, complex systems, you can also gain more control and security over your business’ data by containing it within a modeling engine that is highly scalable and available around the clock. Amidst the global pandemic, businesses have been seeking out more modern digital architecture to weather the storms of supply-chain disruptions and other persistent issues that affect speed and precision. Minimizing unpredictability to combat the chaos is one of the surest ways that we can free ourselves to spend more time on significant and value-add tasks with more confidence and decisiveness in business performance.
Cases like those of Shelf Drilling and Heiniger are not unique. AI-based solutions are mobilizing countless businesses around the world to tame the beast of unpredictability while also bolstering speed and precision to keep in lock-step pace with their competitors. Indeed, automation in financial planning and beyond will be a top strategy to improve performance for the manufacturing sector.
Gone are the days of scattered data. Disconnected, human managed digital architecture no longer must shape your company’s outcomes. The statistics encourage us to take the next step in the digitalization process. Given the technology available today, implementation is not the slow-moving behemoth it once was. By empowering the sector to automate, adapt and react in real-time to change, we can confidently accelerate performance with much needed precision.
Originally published in Australian Manufacturing Technology magazine
