How is your Digital Transformation strategy shaping up? Are you unsure where to start or how to make progress? ITI Group discusses the key consideration to make when starting a Digital Smart Factory journey, in this 5-step essential guide to ensuring Digital Transformation success.
Step 1 – Recognise the business drivers behind your digital journey
IoT, Industry 4.0, digitalisation, etc, etc. Everyone’s heard the buzz words and now, more than ever, everyone wants ‘one’. But they’re simply just that, words. In reality, they mean different things to different people and organisations, and there are different solutions for different industries. There isn’t an Industry 4.0 ‘one size fits all’ solution. All too often people want to ‘do’ digitalisation and ask for a digital solution, maybe OEE or electronic quality records because they’ve heard it will help them. Some even go as far as saying they ‘want an MES solution’. Often when challenged with why, the answer is – ‘we don’t have one’, ‘we want to improve OEE’ or ‘we don’t want our business to get left behind’. This can be especially common with larger corporations. For example, when adopting OEE within a business certain things happen; stakeholder buy-in is achieved, a project team is put together, they build a specification or URS and go out to tender to various system vendors. But are all the company’s sites experiencing the same problems? Will one size fit all? Will OEE fix your number one business challenge or help hit one of your business goals? These are all important questions, but the latter are critical. If OEE isn’t going to solve a business challenge or meet one of the business goals, then it isn’t the right solution. Understanding how digital technologies will solve your most critical challenges and how it will move your company forward in achieving its business goals requires taking a step back.
Step 2 – Analyse your current state to help define and reach your future state
In step 1 we discussed that your digital journey should be linked to a business goal or target. This allows you to define what the success of the project will look like and you can align both internally and with your vendor. Now that everyone is aligned it’s important to understand where you are (your current state) and what you need to do to get there (future state). It’s the ready, set before you GO. Time to air the dirty laundry. Problems and challenges need to be shared, and in doing so you future align the business by identifying shared pains.
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