Over centuries, the industrial revolutions shaped the modern industry landscape as we know it today. With the advent of each revolution arriving at a more accelerated pace, the industry witnessed a momentous technology-intensive approach to industrial operations. The fourth industrial revolution, commonly known as Industry 4.0 (I4.0), has been transformative but predominantly confined to a narrow segment. Digitizing a production facility and building smart factories is not enough to fully seize the new opportunities that modern-day advanced technologies and digital innovation offer. Moreover, it is crucial to comprehend that the emerging technologies have given us access to higher data volumes and better insights. In addition, they have compelled us to evaluate the possibilities and opportunities across multiple dimensions for enhanced decision-making.
As industries rapidly evolve with the emergence of transformational technologies and a changing market environment, organizations must rethink how they do business, design and develop products, deliver services, and cater to customers and the workforce. Figure-1 enlists the key driving forces, including an increased focus on sustainability, worker well-being, and resilient global supply chains, among others, accelerating the shift to a new industrial paradigm beyond smart manufacturing:
Figure 1: Key Transformative Forces Accelerating the Industrial Paradigm Shift
Industry NeXT: The road beyond Industry 4.0
Today, as customers are switching their perception of value from owning physical assets to experiencing value, enterprises must look beyond their traditional boundaries and rethink organizational functions. Intelligent enterprises must embrace agility at scale, adopt digital-first business models, and build resilient value chains based on the emerging ecosystem-centric industrial landscape. Businesses across all stages of digital maturity adoption must evolve to collaborate with partners, customers, employees, and other marketplace players. This enables a connected ecosystem that brings together the digital and physical worlds through intelligent technologies for co-creating value. With all industries going toward a paradigm shift, Industry NeXT by HCLTech can empower businesses to build upon Industry 4.0 as the foundation and embrace the next era of connected ecosystems:
Figure 2: Industry NeXT: Building on an Industry 4.0 Foundation for More Value Realization
What is Industry NeXT?
Industry NeXT, a digital transformation framework, helps businesses become expansive, adaptive, and future-ready by providing a strategic roadmap to manage their ecosystem life cycle. It caters to the unique needs of connected products, connected infrastructure, connected operations, and connected users.
As shown in Figure-2, Industry NeXT further builds on the Industry 4.0 foundation and empowers organizations to move toward a connected, modular, and simplified way of doing business. It elevates the perspective of Industry 4.0 from focusing on manufacturing operations to a broader range by employing more advanced technologies, including digital thread, digital twin, 5G/AR/VR, cobots, nanobots, artificial intelligence on edge, and more.
Why do businesses need to embrace Industry NeXT?
Businesses taking the transformation pathway to Industry NeXT are bound to drive innovation, revenue growth, and operational efficiency while realizing the vision to co-create value across the ecosystem, leading to greater productivity, growth, and sustainability.
Figure-2 depicts how Industry NeXT helps businesses look beyond narrow, function-specific definitions and pursue much bigger objectives. This includes resilient business operations, improved net-zero operations, and strengthened synergy between humans and autonomous machines to ensure better top-line growth and bottom-line impact.
With Industry NeXT, businesses across industries can take full advantage of the opportunities that cognitive ecosystems present, as shown in Figure-3 below:
Figure 3: Cognitive Ecosystems Present Opportunities across Industries
- Foster a community of insights and actions by creating a digital thread that connects assets, people, and processes to facilitate sharing data, insights, applications, and expertise
- Create context within the ecosystem by building an agile, hyper-responsive, and adaptive ecosystem backed with intelligence to deliver a more personalized and autonomous experience for customers and partners
- Build with reliability and empathy by equipping employees with smart workplace solutions to enable remote work and seamless collaboration that improves worker well-being and productivity
- Operate with resiliency and sustainability by ensuring energy efficiency, wastage reduction, and lower carbon emissions
- Respond with cognitive and self-healing capability by using advanced AI/ML technologies to proactively predict issues and automatically execute preventative steps to avert any impact on the business
- Rapidly deploy, build, and rebuild through microservices by leveraging software platforms at scale and speed with agility
Are you ready for Industry NeXT?
To become future-ready, enterprises must digitize their ecosystem, not just their factories or warehouses. Many businesses have already invested in I4.0 initiatives but aren't getting the most out of their digital investments. Alternatively, at the other end of the spectrum, some businesses have still not embarked on their I4.0 journey or have just initiated their digital transformation efforts.
Industry NeXT by HCLTech empowers you to delve into key areas within the Industry NeXT map regardless of where your business is placed in the spectrum. Navigate the NeXT with HCLTech by either building on your current I4.0 foundation to revamp core business operations or by initiating your transformation journey today to stay ahead amid a rapidly changing paradigm.
To know more about Industry NeXT by HCLTech, please visit https://www.hcltech.com/Internet-of-Things-IoT/industry-next or write to us at iotworks@hcl.com
