Exploit innovation potential
Is digital transformation a magic box?
Pandemic-related issues have dominated the digital transformation in recent months. They have proved that digitisation projects work quickly. But now it’s time to harness the potential beyond remote working and strengthening corporate resilience.
Text: Barbara Biesuz,
COVID-19 has given digitisation a massive boost. Working from home is practically the new norm. Indeed remote working has made modern, crisis-resistant technologies, robust cybersecurity and digital processes far more important. Most employees were empowered quickly and without any problems. So why not extend the digitisation momentum to core businesses?
After all, business and IT have been adapting to the changing consumer habits of customers for some time now, taking advantage of the cloud or tapping into new revenue streams thanks to digital business models. However, IoT, 5G, data analytics and cloud-Technologies offer many more opportunities for digitising and transforming business models and constitute a hidden potential in every industry, business sector and company. It’s therefore time to turn to the future and tackle transformation projects that will drive our core businesses forward.
Successful examples of digital transformation
The following real-life examples clearly show that there are hardly any limits to digitisation and that such projects often provide multiple benefits. So the comparison with a magic box isn’t entirely wrong.
Vertical Farming employs technology to take agriculture to the next evolutionary level. Growcer produces fresh vegetables in a former municipal warehouse. Light, temperature and humidity are continuously measured by sensors and adjusted to the needs of the plants to create ideal growing conditions. In the long term, it is hoped that robots will handle everything fully automatically, controlled by video data from the plants. Sustainability par excellence: Producing in the middle of cities reduces transport routes and food waste to a minimum.
Thanks to a combination of robotics and 5G, fresh vegetables are growing in a warehouse.
Quality control for cereals in remote areas: Huge silos stand in the Hungarian pampas. The cereals stored in these silos are sensitive to changes in temperature, humidity and CO2. Geneva-based testing and verification company SGS has been monitoring cereal quality automatically using IoT technology for more than two years. Predictive analysis and maintenance help prevent contamination of the silos. This improves quality, decreases grain loss and inspection times and slashes operating costs. The company thus saves on resources and prevents its cereals from spoiling.
Cereal monitoring at SGS ensures a new level of quality.
Monitoring recreational facilities and green spaces: Heat maps are generated from anonymised and aggregated cellular data in order to help understand how and when leisure facilities are used by the general public. The resulting utilisation figures can serve to make data-based decisions regarding the expansion, reduction or construction of recreational infrastructure and can help improve the planning of maintenance requirements.
A better overview on construction sites: Artificial intelligence detects heavy construction machinery on construction sites based on images from surveillance cameras. Software identifies the type and model and generates machine usage reports from this data. Security can also be improved in the same way in the future: Security intervals can be measured and compliance with helmet- or goggle-wearing requirements can be ensured.
Of course, the big question remains what projects you should tackle in your own company and at what level. After all, it’s not purely about technology, but also about people and culture. To pick up on the previous metaphor, a magic box needs a magician too. This is where digital transformation advisors can be consulted in order to jointly generate and prioritise ideas and help develop and implement the individual transformation projects.
Newsletter
Would you like to regularly receive interesting articles and whitepapers on current ICT topics?
More on the topic:
