Conditions exist for intelligent industry to take shape in India

Software is driving paradigm shifts for all industries, transforming operations and enabling the emergence of connected products thereby blurring the lines between virtual and physical worlds. Capgemini, with its knowledge and global expertise, can accelerate three big changes: Digital Inside, Digital Continuity, and Digital Convergence to drive the intelligent industrial revolution in the market place, claims Ananth Chandramouli, MD - India Market, Capgemini. Excerpts.

Intelligent Industry, for Capgemini, is about leveraging synergies between digital and engineering to develop smart products, operations, and services at scale. It means harnessing the power of data to foster innovation, make new and differentiated products, improve supply chains, create new customer experiences, and deliver new sources of value. The future of digital transformation is characterised by the growth and convergence of products, software, data, and services across industries. The unimaginable amounts of data and the continuous collection, flow, and analysis of the data at scale can help companies find insights to improve operational performance, reliability, and autonomy, bring new innovations to market faster, and deliver intelligent products and associated new services, and customer experiences.

The prerequisites do exist and the context is ready. For instance, some 80% of enterprises in India who participated in a Capgemini study agreed that different organisational functions such as R&D, production, sales, etc worked in silos. For enterprises to scale up, these risks need to be mitigated. They should start initially exploring and gaining confidence in the viability, feasibility, and desirability of the intelligent product or service before starting a more cost-intensive detailed design and development effort.

An organisation-wide culture of innovation must be nurtured, as well as newer, agile ways of working by coordinating not only with the central innovation team but consider an open and continuous innovation strategy across business and functional units. Organisations must have a centralised independent entity with a mandate to decide on identification and ideation of new use cases for intelligent products and services. This set up also would aid in a unified, coordinated growth strategy, benefiting from a bird’s eye view of all the initiatives and improve success rates.

Capgemini is a frontrunner in Intelligent Industry, and we deliver holistic digital transformation for large industrial and technology companies. Our knowledge and global expertise can accelerate three big changes – Digital Inside, Digital Continuity, and Digital Convergence to drive the intelligent industrial revolution. Digital Inside, where sensors and software are embedded in products (machinery or end-consumer products) that have the ability to sense and transmit data; Digital Continuity, where a full or partial “virtual” model is now possible during any stage of the product lifecycle (i.e., from R&D stage to its readiness for use by end consumers); and Digital Convergence, which enables alignment between the world of Information Technology / IT (ERP, CRM etc.) and the world of Operations Technology / OT (sensors, IoT-enabled devices, etc.) systems, which was not visible earlier. Intelligent operations for traditional plants and industrial operations can become smart with new digital technologies leading to changes in the design of factories, systems, their supply chains, and operations. Intelligent support and services are a possibility with every product being connected digitally.

Software is driving paradigm shifts for all industries, transforming operations and enabling the emergence of connected products thereby blurring the lines between virtual and physical worlds. This is made possible because of maturation, accelerating deployment and convergence of technologies like AI, ML, 5G, Cloud and Edge computing, blockchain and IoT amongst others. Connected products and platforms are enabling organisations to propose a new set of data-driven services, and thereby transforming both the customer experience and business and operating models. Organisations that have made strong progress with Intelligent Industry initiatives are already enjoying significant benefits. Advanced organisations are seeing benefits like reduced cost of service, faster research and development of products and services, reduced environmental impact, and more. According to our report, 86% of organisations in India have witnessed reduced environmental impact and 91% of organisations have seen improved customer experience. Additionally, 82% Indian organisations have seen improved product performance and decrease in customer churn.

Organisations face critical skill shortages in building intelligent products and services portfolios. According to the survey, more than 7 in 10 (72%) organisations agree that intelligent offerings will become a key proposition for them in the next three years. Consequently, demand is growing for the technology and software capabilities required to produce intelligent products and services. The most critical gap is that of talent, especially data governance, management, and data science professionals, followed by product innovation specialists and agile methodology specialists. There will also be strong demand for networking engineers and product development engineers.