No digitalisation without updating IT
22-06-2022 | Posted by Principia
There are two ways to travel, with or without destination. Moving haphazardly may lead to a happy ending but, if you know where you are going, planning becomes simpler, risks reduce and, above all, you do what you want, not what chance happens to bestow upon you. It is a matter of having control of the result.
The same applies to digitalisation in the industrial sector.
In any company, starting a digitalisation process is not an isolated goal, it requires a strategy and an analysis of the available resources, physical, human and financial.
A Ferrari is useless if we cannot drive it and, likewise, we cannot operate an ERP without providing licences to the team members or if their connections to the servers take ages to activate.
Hence, a preliminary step in the trip is updating our IT.
What does an IT update imply?
For decades the industrial sector has developed its management software (from simple invoicing programs to sophisticated ERPs) and kept the data on its own servers with the undisguised objective of protecting knowledge and preventing leaks to competitors.
This is one of the main barriers to digitalisation, understanding that the physical world is not safer than the virtual one, that our own servers are usually more vulnerable than the cloud.
An update of the infrastructure brings many benefits:
- Working on cloud avoids depending on physical environments: from remote working to sharing multidisciplinary projects at multiple sites becomes an easy reality.
- An updated infrastructure allows working with flexible platforms and using an ecosystem of specialised tools to deal with any specific needs.
- We must focus on the core business of our company. Writing and developing programs takes time and money, often with poor results because it is not our business. There are specialists in each area that can help to optimise all processes.
None of this is possible if we do not acknowledge that hardware and software affect our company’s culture. The orientation of this subject within our organisation will allow counting on well-motivated teams and entail a substantial reduction in maintenance costs.
We at Principia work with our industrial clients to help them attain goals of efficiency and process improvement. As Dassault Systèmes’ partners, we perceive ever more clearly the required first step of “modernising the communication platforms” of any company.
Because, if we want to travel by car, we need to have it serviced before attempting to cross the country or the continent. And even more so if our sector depends on technology and innovation.
If you want advice on how to improve your processes, contact us freely and we’ll help.
