Using technology to set business goals
Use technology to set business goals
How to set digital goals
Capturing your digital potential
Defining business end-goals and the cost / benefit of applying certain digital technologies, as well as the digitalization roadmap to follow through a digital transformation plan, are key to guarantee success for steel producers to achieve industry 4.0 and the digital factory of the future.
Understanding Digital Maturity
Manufacturers are aware there is no single digital factory setting approach, due to variations in layouts, products, degree of automation, etc. while necessary components for digital transformation are widely known due to their universal relevance, i.e. people, data, products, services, infrastructure, process, cybersecurity, etc.
The industry can focus on making a practical and effective plan from ‘true current’ to ‘desired future’ status by evaluating and understanding digital maturity, keeping in mind that ‘future status’ is not always a ‘real end state’ because the target is always moving faster. Understanding where you are today will allow your team to address any major roadblocks in the digital transformation roadmap. Let’s approach analysis through following holistic dimensions:
- Business strategy
- Processes
- Products and / or Services
- People
- Infrastructure.
Each dimension is detailed in various key work areas to help companies to reach digital transformation.
This framework is intended to offer a holistic vision of company areas and its challenges, linking these challenges with the enablers necessary for its transformation.
In the vertiginous acceleration of digital transformation, the holistic framework approach becomes increasingly relevant. Manufacturers, sometimes, miss or forget to link these 5 dimensions and their corresponding components with business end-goal strategies, thus, failing in their attempts to digitalize even when they prioritize investments based on their own specific objectives. This vertiginous situation conduces everyone to implement digital transformation 'no matter how', but in fact, there is still an alarming gap between digital ambition and real execution, conducting teams to a sense of frustration, because they don't see results.
Technology
Avoid the illusion of being digital, only because you are doing digital, doing and being are not the same, being means applying real internal changes to businesses. Technology must be useful. A roadmap will define specific technology to solve specific problems. The same technology tool does not necessarily have to apply to all problems. When tailoring a solution per each scenario and necessity, functional analysis together with the 16 drivers and 5 dimensions helps define the Digitalization Roadmap. This document is useful to avoid wasting valuable resources, for example, a talented team could waste tremendous effort with isolated initiatives and isolated investments. One Digitalization Roadmap will also prevent different teams from implementing non-standard technologies within the same company.
