Congratulations! You have successfully arrived at the “end of the beginning” of the “post covid world”. In the next weeks the tougher lock down restrictions will be lifted. This is the beginning of “the new normal”. Social distancing will be with us for the foreseeable future, until the majority of people have had a vaccine which may be well into 2021 or later. We will continue to have outbreaks and some short lock downs, and junior schools and creches will be a big challenge going forward. Your head will be worn out listening to the endless debates, but forward we go!
From a manufacturing industry perspective it has been a historic few months. Who would have thought that such radical changes in enterprises could happen so quickly? It is really quite amazing the number of changes, that we had talked about in manufacturing for years, suddenly happened in a matter of weeks. This thing put a turbo on “Digital Transformation” like nothing we have ever seen.
– Remote visibility of contextual data for is not “nice to have” it is essential for making critical business decisions
– The IT systems and data architectures have to be able to respond to changing demands. The business cannot just live with long latency.
– Having key team members working remotely is going to be much more the norm, we are not going backwards. Real time visibility of supply chain, inventory, WIP, batch records and more is critical
– Face to face meeting will be a rarity for the foreseeable so remote collaboration tools become business critical
In this crisis many manufacturing enterprises have struggled to respond to the requests to put real time data in to the devices of the people that need it. We need to do better.
Another interesting thing is that although many of us have ended up working from home we do have time on our hands – which makes you realise just how much unproductive time there is between leaving home in the morning and getting back. Many technology leaders have been taking advantage of this time to review strategies for data infrastructure and data architecture, not least because this crisis has exposed many of the weaknesses that they already knew were there but had no opportunity to try to solve.
“Have we really understood what is critical for the stakeholders in our enterprise? Is our data architecture and IT infrastructure able to respond to the evolving business needs of the enterprise”
Big questions We had been doing lots of “in-person” workshops and labs working on the human collaboration aspects of these questions. In the past coupe of months we have had to figure out fast how to do this using remote collaboration tools. We have run more of these Accelerator Workshops sessions in the past two months than we had run in the previous twelve. If you think a review and a slight change of approach could help address the business needs of your enterprise we would be happy to set up an initial exploratory conversation. Reach out to your contact at Hanley Networks for an initial discussion as to how we can help you maximise this opportunity for a new course