While the world struggles from the ongoing pandemic, it has been changed irreversibly during this struggle. The new world order is expected to stay even after the infectious disease is curtailed, and in this changed reality, enterprises, operations, and people would be far more integrated than ever, with the help of cloud technologies and digital technologies, along with artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The COVID-19 outbreak has impacted more than 140 countries and infected over two million people globally. This has affected not only the day-to-day lives of individuals, but has also posed the question of survival for many industries. Till date, industries have been cautious of integrating operations and cloud technologies, core to the production of industrial output, due to the risk of security threats. However, the situation arising out of the pandemic has posed challenges like uncertainty in staff availability, supply chain disruptions, and capacity reduction due to operation disruption. These challenges need to be addressed and mitigated. Smart Integrated Enterprises can sail through these challenging times by smoothening these disruptions.
Smart Integrated Enterprises adopt digital technologies for better organizational decision-making.
What is a Smart Integrated Enterprise?
Smart Integrated Enterprises are organizations that have adopted digital technologies and artificial intelligence to integrate their operations (manufacturing, logistics, and supply chains, among other areas) and bring critical information from diverse systems together to enable organization-wide insights of the business and operations to enable effective decision-making.
How can Smart Integrated Enterprises mitigate the risks faced in the new world?
One of the biggest challenges that organizations are facing today is the lack/uncertainty of staff availability. There is high dependency on onsite staff to monitor various OT systems at the factory shop floor and operate them. Over the years, industries have been moving toward incorporating remote monitoring solutions; however, such initiatives have been limited in scale and in numbers.
However, with social distancing norms to ensure minimal impact on production processes; there is a greater need to remotely monitor the OT environment including equipment, people, and processes to ensure appropriate operations continuity is maintained and health and safety norms are followed. This would enable organizations to operate with limited staff by enabling them with tools to monitor and operate multiple manufacturing plants.
Organizations also face supply chain challenges due to equipment breakdown and increased downtimes. By leveraging IoT and machine learning, Smart Integrated Enterprises can adopt condition-based maintenance. This will help in reducing the bandwidth crunch on limited manpower; and would also smoothen out supply chain disruptions
.
Technology can also enable limited maintenance staff to leverage the expertise of subject matter experts located remotely to perform the maintenance work on site. Solutions like AR/VR-guided operations can help in achieving these efficiencies and further in reducing supply chain disruptions.
What does it take to be integrated?
As the industries and their operations become more and more integrated, the complexity of ecosystems grows multifold. Organizations might find operating these complex technology integrations challenging in a scalable and reliable manner. The complexity is not one-dimensional, but is about the variety and number of technology pivots working together including connectivity to OT ecosystems, diverse set of devices connecting over a variety of protocols, along with cloud technologies, platforms and applications. However, as the sustainability of enterprises depends upon these initiatives, Smart Integrated Enterprises would need partners to support Smart Integrated Operations enabling technology and business functions.
IoT WoRKS by HCLTech has pioneered in managing and operating large-scale Smart Integrated Operations (SIO) for our customers, and over the years, supported our customers’ core businesses. Thus, we ensured that our customers can focus on their core business and innovation while we deliver end-to-end operations, monitoring, and managing coordination with internal and external stakeholders to ensure all operational disruptions are managed, maintaining a high uptime to critical business assets and operations. This is achieved by leveraging digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to support operations at scale and integrating proven IT service management principles to help our customers focus on and scale their business.
While we understand there are plenty of challenges that we face today, new world enterprises would be more robust, more integrated, and smarter in managing their operations sustainably with the holistic solution-centric approach of IoT WoRKS™.
