Sustainable Growth With Digital Transformation

Today we live in an age of continuous disruption that comes in waves. Successful organisations have one winning trait: a 'Resiliency Mindset' that prepares them for constant transformation, stay relevant, and grow. 

It is time to elevate your design, development, manufacturing, supply chain management, invoicing, and after-sales product management processes. Digital is the glue that binds all these processes and empowers the key core functional areas such as Design, Produce, Sell, Concept, operate plus Retire – the five critical transformation buckets.

How a digital-led manufacturing process will lead to greater collaboration, flexible manufacturing, mass customisation, intelligent services, and more fantastic CX. In partnership with Autodesk, the recent BW Businessworld Roundtable unpacked this with leading experts from this sector. Hoshie Ghaswalla of Business World moderated the discussion. 

SETTING THE CONTEXT

In his opening Keerti Malavooru, Technical Solutions Executive, Autodesk India said, 

“Every customer is unique. Everyone is trying to create their own persona. You know, the products they are making or in terms of the people they are employing or even the different diverse markets they are serving. While customer demands put pressure on new products, the teams need help to deliver on those expectations. Moreover, 72 per cent of the products fail to meet profits targets. More concerning is that many organisations have reached a productivity plateau, estimated to grow only about 3 per cent yearly. It means organisations see only small productivity gains as they do the same, with minimal incremental improvements.”

This is precisely why manufacturing organisations need to have a well-thought-out digital strategy and execution because it has a direct bearing on their productivity and profits.

The pandemic has taught us to have an always-on resilient supply chain and well-intended digital core that can evolve constantly.

EXPERT VIEWPOINTS 

Let's look at some of the critical questions we asked the esteemed panel of speakers from the manufacturing industry—excerpts from the discussions.

Taming Disruption

Disruption creates opportunities. How has disruption impacted your organization and the kind of opportunities it has made? Let's look at what the panel said:

Karthik Raman, Head of Product Management, Kennametal

Disruptions do create a lot of opportunities for us. The only thing is you know how the disruptions are happening today; the magnitude and the pace at which these new technologies are emerging pose a challenge. That's unprecedented. I think digital still needs to be fully realised, and we are grappling with many applications coming by the day. By applying digital, we increased the operational efficiencies of our business mandates through more precise manufacturing outcomes using various digital tools that empower our core manufacturing processes.

Lokesh Soni, HOD - Vehicle Dynamics and Performance, Simple Energy

“Disruption is inevitable. To leap ahead, we must disrupt every field but tap into the proper parameters to benefit and evolve out of disruption”.

Mazher Ali Baig Mirza, Head of Mechanical Design, River

Disruption must be harnessed for business impact. Particularly, in the case of Electric Vehicles (EVs), we need to evolve with the industry as it is still nascent in India. We must look for perspectives from ongoing disruptions and connect back to our core domain to develop a cutting edge product.

Bikash Jyoti Biswas, Head of Design, Ather Energy Pvt. Ltd

I agree disruption is everywhere. But blindly following disruption will not do any good; hence what not to do is essential. We should be aware of the technology product limitations, and our ambitions to tame disruption must be grounded. Therefore, there might be better ideas than a blanket transformation for a business.

Parminder Singh, Country Head Design and Manufacturing & Media Entertainment - India & SAARC, Autodesk

Disruption touches organisations in many ways. For some, it's products; for others, it's services. The essence here is that it should impact your business positively in more ways than one. That's what at Autodesk we are doing, how to enable our customers' aspirations and address the disruptive forces and help them achieve their business goals via digital technologies.

Managing Siloed Processes

Let’s look at the next critical question we asked the panel. One of the most significant pain areas is navigating siloed processes- from procurement to product delivery. Several broken processes and traditional technologies cause severe manufacturing scope creep. The organisation needs well-laid-out strategies to manage siloed processes and pain areas. On this aspect, the panelists unanimously agreed that it's an issue, but they are constantly evolving in addressing these issues and going towards more tightly knit ecosystems. As a result, it has had a direct bearing on their operational efficiencies leading to tangible business outcomes.

Connected Manufacturing

Next came connected manufacturing. Organisations can use connected data to enable better-informed decisions, drive innovation, increase productivity, and create new business opportunities.

Considering this thought, Sumi Vivek, CTO of Tata Electronics, said, "Connected manufacturing is table stakes now. We are going toward a single source of truth by having a snapshot of the systems in the manufacturing process; whether it be from IT systems or sensors or machine data - we have an integrated view. We need to harness this capability further".

The rest of the panel also agreed on the need to harness data and the power of connected systems. According to Karthik Raman, "The one thing I see in data transformation is that the connected systems are becoming more and more cloud operational, and that is where even Kennametal has invested quite a lot in the last few years. We aim to harness data effectively for greater insights and business and process gains. End of the day, you drive the decisions, and data and systems play an enabling role". 

Agrees Mazher Ali Baig Mirza, "Being a startup, we rely heavily on data. We try to make sense out of the available data and glean out patterns that will have a huge impact on our business. It is a continuous process, and we keep getting better by the day”.

Giving his perspective, Parminder Singh made the point that "Connected systems are essential, and they create a lot of value for our customers. So usually, when we engage or talk to them, they look at a platform that can help them seamlessly harness data and distil information travelling across different organisations or departments which are working in silos if you can make that information flow across them. That's what we do to them- a platform-centric approach”.

The panel also touched on other pertinent aspects like actioning a cloud strategy and execution, challenges and solutions and a staged approach to digital transformation.

Overall, it's an enriching discussion that unpacked the plethora of challenges and innovations the manufacturing sector faces on the road to actioning a sustainable digital transformation.