Unlocking growth and efficiency potential: Make industrial digital transformation plans a reality

Author: Schneider Electric

Digital transformation – using data to improve your operational performance and create new business models – is ubiquitous across all business sectors. For industrial companies, this means making factory operations and supply chains smarter, enabling them to make data-driven decisions to improve operational continuity, safety, efficiency, and sustainability.

But this isn’t an easy journey due to perceived high costs, complex implementation, and a hesitant workforce. However, many benefit from the support (and learnings) from those who’ve already traveled the path. Our Schneider ElectricTMIndustrial Digital Transformation Service Team partners with companies to implement comprehensive end-to-end industrial digital transformation projects using a proven methodology for:

• Operational excellence
• Asset performance
• Sustainability and energy management
• Cybersecurity

Why a program approach can help industrial digital transformation success

Even when companies know it’s essential, digital transformation isn’t easy:

• 94% of businesses believe digital transformation will greatly impact their operations in the next 2-3 years
• 55% of businesses say they’re only “somewhat equipped” to deploy successfully
• More than 80% of companies plan to accelerate their digital transformations, but only 30% of such moves achieve their objectives

This is where digital transformation services and consultancy bridges plans with action.

Since 2017, Schneider Electric has driven industrial digital transformation success within our plants, with five earning Manufacturing Lighthouse status from the World Economic Forum (WEF) and another three named Sustainability Lighthouses. With this success, our customers began asking for stronger support to make their efforts fruitful, leading us to scale our digital transformation consultancy.

Why now is the time for digital transformation

Our partnerships begin by asking “why” not “what” your reasons for initiating a digital transformation are. For example, do you need to:

• Increase capacity to meet growing demands
• Improve productivity to reduce operating costs
• Optimize time-to-market
• Identify new avenues for business growth (e.g., markets, products)
• Meet sustainability targets

We assess where your operations are today to get them to their true potential. We combine consultative and delivery methodology to accelerate strategic planning and industrial digital transformation. By offering an outsider’s perspective, we often find insights that are hard to see from the inside to help:

• Analyze current business challenges
• Bring domain expertise to define a transformation plan
• Elaborate business cases for change
• Design solutions and deploy
• Understand and apply data insights
• Return on investment estimates

Managing transformation changes

New technologies and processes can create uneasiness within your workforce. Change management is critical for success to pinpoint how the transformation process impacts current operations and where it will lead. This means creating a compelling narrative to drive the work of advocacy and adoption.

For example, cognitive bias – attempting to fit familiar technology to new problems – can hinder this process. To help address this, engineering teams work closely with our consultants and customers to fully understand the identified outcomes and required technologies to get there. We leverage Schneider Electric technologies to support the right solution while fully recognizing that another manufacturer might offer the ideal option.

We work to help customers support change within their organizations. Getting buy-in from teams throughout the company by helping develop ownership throughout the organization is important, and top-down approaches don’t work. 

Scaling business and transformation value

By applying our proven methodology, you can scale your plan more rapidly. However, scaling plans across multiple facilities involves helping customers move beyond a project mindset to a program mindset. A project mindset focuses on individual initiatives for different teams — supply chain, operations, or engineering, each with its key performance indicators. But this independent, one-by-one approach might not move the needle forward. Instead, we help partners work from a program mindset to determine a possible multi-year journey that can make a difference. This is how solutions can scale.

If you’re considering moving towards a digital transformation and need more information, download our eGuide and visit our Industrial Digital Transformation portal.

Tags: change management, customer satisfaction, Digital transformation, industrial digital transformation, Industrial Sustainability, Scalability