Factory of the Future! Value from Digital Transformation

For industrial sectors, it is a time of uncertainty. Market disruption abounds, and change is inevitable. For companies that can make fast, effective decisions, change presents significant opportunity and not just existential risk.  Industrial leaders deal with this by leveraging transformational technologies such as generative AI to evolve business models, focusing on competitive and operating excellence, anticipating changes to the workforce and work itself, establishing cyber-resilient operations, and driving energy transition and sustainability into core business strategies.

By embracing a digital-first mindset, companies can dismantle constraints that limit their capacity to quickly produce the correct goods and services for  the marketplace. Through digitally-driven business agility, leaders succeed and grow, embracing goals of competitive excellence and revenue creation, while delivering production efficiency and operational excellence to protect margins.  These companies are integrating digital technology, such as AI and cognitive analytics, digital twins, predictive technologies, and other technologies, throughout their value chains. Design and engineering, production operations, maintenance, logistics, supply chain, business systems, customers, products, and organizational structure are undergoing innovative change as companies adapt to increasingly dynamic market conditions. Leaders understand that attaining business agility, enabled by digital technologies, is critical to responsiveness, resilience, and competitive differentiation.

Companies that are more advanced in their digital journeys are also already integrating sustainability and energy transition initiatives into their decision making, balancing them with competitive excellence, resilience and agility, and workforce goals. Powered by transformative technologies, innovative processes, and data, industrial leaders are creating smart integrated systems that can develop new insights and, in some cases, even automate decision making, to optimize corporate performance and improving competitive excellence. These new systems can also support improved cybersecurity, helping industrial companies protect against significant and growing digital risk. Check out the G&J Pepsi case study here.

Technologies like digital twin, cloud, AI, edge computing, IoT, cybersecurity technology, additive manufacturing, augmented reality, and more are enabling new business processes and obscuring traditional functional boundaries.  OT, IT, and ET teams are growing their skills and capabilities, transforming real-time operations.  ESG, governance and compliance, workforce and skills, customer-centricity, competitive excellence, and change management all need management attention. Executives charged with driving transformation are seizing this moment to innovate and deliver value.  Call it digital transformation, smart manufacturing, or Industry 4.0, industrial companies are unlocking business agility to better innovate, transform, and succeed in both the present and future.

Is your organization successfully evolving to be a digital organization?

The 28th Annual ARC Industry Forum held on February 4-8th, 2024, covered practical ways to speed up your digitalization, sustainability, and energy transition initiatives with strategies and stories from your peers. To learn more about how transforming factories, plants, and infrastructure will benefit technology end users and suppliers alike, forum speakers reveal what your peers and industry leaders are doing today and what steps they are taking to prepare for the future. In the video below, Jeff Erwin VP of Manufacturing and Quality at G&J Pepsi, presents The Future Is NOW! Accelerating the Transformation click to play on demand.