| |AUGUST 20229in a big way to improve the environment, making the business/industry sustainable. In fact, efforts in my current company has taken a metamorphic shift in the last one year, and going digital has become the mantra to focus on largely three objectives viz. im-provement in growth, productivity and experience. I am sure you would have noticed that while growth and productivity largely is the focus of every organi-zation in the world, experience is something that is extremely important. It means providing excellent experience to our customers, employees and other stakeholders. At the same time, ensuring that all our efforts are keeping in mind that we give back to moth-er earth as well as create an ecosystem that helps the industry to remain sustainable. Few of my favorite initiatives are those which re-duce travel of employees as well as our customers and where it is easier to convert physical activities to virtual. These help us save not only time and money, but also contribute in reducing carbon footprint due to less usage of fossil fuel. These initiatives range from virtual tours of our factories by customers us-ing augmented reality-based solutions to leveraging blockchain based fiber to retail, traceability to ensure ethical sourcing practices. Reduction in data entry or its automation will immensely help every organiza-tion, as it directly impacts the size of value adding manpower and people can spend more time in those areas that bring real value to the organization rather than just entering and re-entering data. RRP is another mantra that is taking front stage these days, where we should plan to automate those processes first that are repetitive, rule based & pre-dictable and at the same time, start converting oth-er processes into RRP by eliminating exceptions and process deviations. This has started giving wonderful results in achieving much better productivity overall. It is seen that if we start automating a broken process, then it will not only fail after some time, but also dis-courage us to pick other processes for automation. So, processing re-engineering or transformation has sig-nificant importance. Experimentation is another area which is fast becoming the way technology works in the industry these days. The digital initiatives should get divided into foundational, desirable and disruptive catego-ries, and while foundational & desirable categories have initiatives that have been tried by others also in world, disruptive initiatives are the ones where the lead should be taken by CIOs to solve problems in a newer and more efficient manner that has not been imagined/attempted so far. This category re-quires a lot of experimentation, and in addition of working with traditional partners, it is important to start working extensively with disruptive start-ups and academia as well as mining the huge pile of ideas of employees. Some of the experiments that I have been doing recently revolve around automatic guided vehicles, computer vision-based productivity improvement and automatic measurement solutions, converting 2D images into 3D models with real time collaboration, AI based identification of fabric com-position, fabric inspection recording automation, NLG based training videos translation in vernacular languages, RFID based productivity improvement and more. There are many more, and it is important that we are not afraid to experiment and fail. With more & more devices, web applications and mobile apps getting connected to the network, it be-comes imperative to ensure that there is no hindrance in business continuity, and external threat actors are kept away from trying to steal data or damage net-work or compute infrastructure. Future belongs to data science and analytics. Currently, a lot of deci-sions in forward looking organizations are based on data. Data is the new oil, and leveraging its value will definitely give extremely valuable actionable in-sights and have potential to impact future business models, and that will be real transformation.
< Page 8 | Page 10 >