What’s the key to successful digital transformation?

Written by Trudi Hable, Global Alliance Leader – Cloud Partners, AVEVA

Digital transformation offers both a significant opportunity and significant threat to industrial companies. Which is why it is a priority focus for most businesses. Exciting new technologies provide opportunities for improved processes, services and strategies, for example, smart factory initiatives that accelerate the digital journey for manufacturers. Possibilities include AI, analytics, cybersecurity, communications, additive manufacturing, augmented reality and many more.

But supporting interconnected transformation initiatives across your business can be a challenge. Production is a clear priority, but services, operations, supply chain and logistics, design and engineering, all need your attention too. Knowing where to start and how to proceed with digital transformation can be confusing, especially in the context of an IT skills shortage.

The gains, though, are clear, as a Deloitte and MAPI Smart Factory Study showed: “Early smart factory adopters report average three-year gains of 10 percent for factory output, factory capacity utilization, and labor productivity. Not just that, these companies expect labor productivity to improve another 2 percentage points to 12 percent by 2022.”

Partnerships are key

The road to business success in the engineering and industrial sectors is clearly through transformation, driven by a backbone of information technology. And the best start is making smart choices around the right IT partner, one who will give you the tools to solve complex problems, make better decisions and improve your processes and resource management. While you focus on your business goals, they should focus on enabling your company to:

• become data-driven, agile and sustainable
• see measurable improvements in terms of productivity, cost, quality and uptime
• enable better management of data and computing resources from cloud to data center and to the edge
• achieve maturity and progress in IoT, analytics, data technology and operational infrastructure

Intelligence-driven performance – cloud is crucial

Artificial intelligence in the manufacturing market is being driven by big data – a deluge of huge, complex datasets – and evolving industrial IoT and automation, as well as the possibilities of ever-increasing compute power. When the data from the IoTs is converted into instructions designed by an AI system, performance and efficiency take a leap, with obvious business rewards. These rewards include sustainability – manufacturers that are empowered to work more efficiently reduce energy consumption and cut emissions.

AVEVA is the 2021 Microsoft Energy Partner of the Year – we’ve expanded our collaboration with Microsoft to focus on Cloud and AI to drive sustainable digital transformation in the manufacturing and energy industries. AVEVA’s portfolio is integrated with Microsoft cloud services to bring infrastructure, data and AI services that make sure you have the intelligence for seamless performance.

Partner with the experts

AVEVA is a global leader in engineering and industrial software, driving digital transformation across the entire asset and operations life cycle of capital-intensive industries. The company’s engineering, planning and operations, asset performance, and monitoring and control solutions deliver proven results to over 16,000 customers across the globe. Our customers are supported by the largest industrial software ecosystem, including 4,200 partners and 5,700 certified developers.

• Our Smart Factory Package allows you get the most out of the high-fidelity data generated by your plant’s equipment, processes and people.
• Our industry-leading cloud-based AI technologies mitigate business and operational risk and improve workforce safety and efficiency.
• Our engineering solutions are proven to save on costs and time and improve efficiency.

AVEVA customers Borg Manufacturing saw efficiency gains of 400% with our integrated MES system, while Canadian shipyard Chantier Davie used the right technology at the right price, implemented in the right way to increase their productivity and efficiency.