We’re excited to share insights from our recent webinar on achieving manufacturing excellence through digital transformation. Hosted by Samppa Lahtinen and Ville Somppi, the session focused on how M-Files in manufacturing can revolutionize the industry.
Overcoming Key Challenges in Manufacturing
In today’s competitive market, growth and profitability hinge on flawless execution. However, many manufacturers face significant challenges:
Information Fragmentation: Information scattered across various systems and departments leads to inefficiencies. Employees struggle to find the right information, deal with access control issues, and face confusion due to duplicates and inconsistent folder structures. Solution: Eliminate information chaos with enterprise search and automation. By unifying visibility to enterprise data, automating document management, and providing personalized views, you can streamline information management processes.
Manual Processes: Reliance on slow, error-prone manual processes reduces operational effectiveness. Solution: Improve efficiency and accuracy with automated workflows. Automating workflows ensures timely task completion, increases information accuracy, and integrates external collaboration seamlessly.
Quality and Compliance: Manual application of document access and sharing rules can lead to breakdowns in audit trails. Solution: Reduce business risk with automated controls and audit trails. Automate permissions based on document type or process phase, include quality and compliance controls in daily workflows, and establish a single source of truth.
Key Trends in Manufacturing
The manufacturing sector faces several challenges, including supply chain disruptions, the rise of smart factories, a growing emphasis on sustainability, and talent obstacles.
Supply Chain Disruptions: Prolonged lead times for critical production materials necessitate robust solutions for operational continuity.
Smart Factories: Digital transformation is essential for efficient and agile production processes.
Sustainability: Manufacturers strive to reduce their environmental impact while maintaining profitability, requiring meticulous documentation and compliance.
Talent Obstacles: Attracting and retaining skilled workers is crucial as technology advances.
M-Files: Your Partner in Digital Transformation
M-Files offers a leading knowledge work automation platform designed to help you find information faster, work smarter, and achieve more. Our platform features an innovative metadata-driven architecture, an embedded workflow engine, and advanced AI capabilities.
Use Cases in Manufacturing
Quality Management: Automate tracking and documentation of compliance with industry standards and regulations.
Asset Information Management: Centralize and organize critical data about machinery and equipment for better maintenance schedules and reduced downtime.
Sales and Delivery Documentation: Automate the creation, storage, and retrieval of essential documents to accelerate the sales cycle and improve customer satisfaction.
Statistics Highlighting the Need for Automation
Employees spend up to 30% of their week finding the right data.
51% of organizations reported non-compliance with data regulations in the past 12 months, with an average total cost of $1.03 million.
Expert Insights
Ville Somppi shared valuable insights on the AI capabilities of M-Files and emerging trends in the manufacturing industry. Here are some key takeaways:
Advice for Manufacturers: Implement M-Files to improve operational efficiency and asset management.
Benefits of AI: M-Files AI capabilities enhance productivity and support workforce development.
Starting the AI Journey: Begin with automating key processes and gradually expand AI integration.
Real-World Examples: M-Files has successfully automated various processes in manufacturing, leading to significant improvements in efficiency and accuracy.
Content intelligence and Digital Transformation are the next big game-changer for businesses. Here’s why.
When I think of data, I think of information, insights, intelligent decision-making, and more. Let me share some results from various surveys:
A study by Boston Consulting Group discovered that 70% of digital transformation efforts had fallen short of their goals
IDC predictions, 80% of global data will be unstructured by 2025
I see a connection between the above two trends. Every organization generates large amounts of unstructured data (High Velocity and Variability), and the inability to get insights from this data often sees them failing to achieve the organizational goals.
Forbes states that one of the top reasons for failed efforts is not having the right data in the right place.
It is clear that with the sheer volume of available data, companies need to leverage the right technologies to extract content intelligence and use this data to their advantage. A digital transformation (DX) platform powered by content intelligence can enable an enterprise to take its vision forward.
How Content Intelligence Accelerates Digital Transformation Platform
Data, whether it is structured or unstructured, is a treasure of content intelligence for organizations. This means modern enterprises need to have the right tools to extract and analyze structured and unstructured data. Content intelligence encompasses a range of technologies, including OCR, AI, ML, and NLP, that can extract, digitize, and efficiently route information throughout the organization.
Simply put, when you have content intelligence, you know more, discover more, and do more. Let us see what content intelligence brings to the table:
1. Empower employees
Organizations have different systems used by various teams and departments. It is important for business applications across different functions to be interconnected. A modern content service system with content intelligence tools can empower employees to gain seamless information flow, collaborate, maintain correspondence of data updates, and take actions whenever necessary.
2. Increase efficiency in business operations
Process efficiency and accuracy across the board can be achieved by leveraging content intelligence. Content intelligence tools like machine learning can effectively identify duplicate records, mismatches, and other exceptions, which helps organizations improve efficiency, cut costs, and eliminate the ‘busy work.’ Data analytics can also help organizations analyze the customer base and accordingly draft business strategies. Additionally, content intelligence can enable real-time strategic and tactical changes to ensure efficient allocation of resources.
3. Smarter decision-making and compliance
Content intelligence tools like machine learning and algorithms can bring context to content, providing business users with the necessary information to make data-driven, smart decisions. Furthermore, businesses are exposed to market and business risks more than ever before. Content intelligence can provide organizations the elasticity and adaptability to make changes in real-time to ensure they remain risk-free and compliant.
4. Excellent customer experience
Organizations can gain powerful customer information by mining and analyzing the available data. Customer information can be found in structured data as well as unstructured data such as chatbots, emails, or phone calls. Streamlining content management processes and content intelligence involves extracting relevant content to learn customers’ behavior, needs, and preferences and accordingly offer personalized offers based on their information. Through classified content, organizations can properly assist customers throughout the various stages of their buyer journey and serve through their preferred channels and devices.
5. Seamless integration
With a modern content services platform equipped with content intelligence tools, you can maximize the use of your data and leverage content intelligence across operations. With content integration, an organization can bridge content siloes and ensure content integrity by managing content across different business applications. Employees can also be empowered with content intelligence to seamlessly access and use contextual content anytime and anywhere.
Organizations focusing on DX recognize agility as the key driver of successful initiatives. While agility is the heart of digital transformation platform, we can say that content intelligence is the brain.
Time to wear your thinking cap!
While we have established the importance of data and extracting intelligence out of it, how can business leaders like you leverage content intelligence to accelerate digital transformation and become a modern enterprise?
To become a modern enterprise that thrives on continuous innovation and customer experience, two ingredients of a digital enterprise are crucial. And those ingredients are context and speed. The ability to efficiently process large-scale content in real-time with content intelligence tools enables contextual engagements. And for speed, organizations need the ability to rapidly build and deploy business applications, which comes with low code.
To get deeper insights into how you can chalk out an action plan to start your digital transformation journey, download the free copy of our co-branded whitepaper with KPMG.
FAQ
1. What different forms of content can be leveraged to harness content intelligence?
Content comes in various formats, including paper documents, digital documents, audio, and video clips, images, emails, instant messages, social media posts, records, and archived documents.
2. What are the right tools for effectively extracting intelligence/insights from content?
Smart technologies that can allow organizations to intelligently handle unstructured data and extract content intelligence include natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, optical character recognition, content analytics, and sentiment analysis.
3. How can content intelligence help my enterprise grow?
Content intelligence can introduce several benefits such as improved business operations, intelligent decision-making, compliance, superior customer experience, and seamless integration.
Climate change continues to pose an existential threat to the global economy. While the impact is felt across different industries, financial institutions are at the forefront of being the change agents. With the world waking up and moving towards low carbon emissions, banks have a major role in enabling this change.
Sustainability for modern financial institutions is not just limited to going paperless or becoming carbon neutral. It incorporates Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) into traditional banking aimed at achieving Sustainable Development Goals3 (SDGs).
Enabling, Accelerating Digital and Sustainable Banking with a Modern Content Services Platform
A key aspect of a purposeful organization is authenticity, with ESG at its core. In this blog, let’s explore how viable modern content services platforms facilitate sustainability priorities in banking, including net-zero emissions, paperless banking, energy efficiency, social goodwill, and brand strengthening—enabling financial institutions to digitally transform and be future-ready.
Paperless Banking: Digital Loan Origination
Traditionally, the customer lending origination process is paper-intensive. It requires application forms and document submission for the pre-qualification process, including copies of identity documents, employment proof, salary slip, bank statement, and previous loan statement. That’s a whole lot of documents from a single applicant. Imagine how many papers are daily printed and submitted to the banks with millions of borrowers globally!
Here’s exactly where the modern content service platform comes into the picture. The platform enables banks to eliminate the traditional ways of managing documents with capabilities to scan, extract, classify, and intelligently upload, share, and store documents. It facilitates banks to transit to paperless banking without compromising their service offerings to reach net-zero emission targets. Once the financial institution embarks on this journey towards paperless banking, emissions from paper production, transportation, physical storage facilities, and electricity will undoubtedly be reduced.
Digital Customer Onboarding
COVID-19 has accelerated the pace and, more importantly, the acceptance and adoption of digital technologies. Account opening can be done paperless by visiting the bank’s website or mobile app and keying in account opening information, such as personal details, scanning or clicking your documents using a mobile camera, and uploading your picture and e-signature. A modern content services platform can organize this data and make it accessible to backend business processes. Having the right platform helps users securely maintain their information over time, allowing them to correct documents, read them on various devices, annotate or collaborate in an electronically-driven environment. This saves a lot of paper, which otherwise gets wasted due to errors, misprints, or multiple copies, and creates a seamless customer experience. Furthermore, it saves the transportation costs from not needing to send the paper waste for recycling and equips an organization to ensure on-demand audit-readiness of documents.
Customer Digital Lifecycle Journey
Traditionally, several phases and sub-phases of a customer lifecycle involve paper-based processes, including data collection of an applicant, document analysis, data enrichment, KYC case review, ongoing customer services, and customer-off boarding. The cycle continues if you succeed in up-sell or cross-sell any new product to customers in between. The modern content services platform can overcome this manual handling process and transform the digital customer lifecycle into a paperless one. The platform helps digitize documents, classify information, extract data, collaborate, and electronically store while significantly minimizing paper usage and costs. Features like e-forms, e-signatures, video KYC, and conversational interfaces can reduce paper trails and help in delivering a superior customer experience.
Energy Efficiency: Green IT through Cloud
On-premise infrastructure must be operational irrespective of the transactional load consuming considerable energy in computing, lighting, and cooling the data centers. Cloud is at the heart of energy savings. Today’s modern content services platforms leverage the cloud effortlessly, enabling business leaders to offer optimized and effective services to banks while consuming considerably fewer resources.
Energy Efficiency through Compression Techniques
Raconteur estimates that by 2025, nearly 463 exabytes of data will be created each day globally.5 Banks are responsible for a sizable chunk of this data, consuming computer resources and energy. Modern content services platforms employ efficient compression techniques to reduce data size, saving computing storage and electricity. The energy savings will compound exponentially with data growth.
Social Goodwill and Brand Strengthening: Financial Inclusion
A modern content services platform and other digital technologies are crucial in taking banking to remote places. Today, a field agent can take a portable device to remote areas and collect customer information, signature, and identity proofs – all paperless, effortlessly bringing them into the banking system. Financial products like account opening, loan origination, payments, and card statements are offered digitally with this platform.
Green Banking
Apart from reducing operational emissions, banks encourage their customers to go paperless as an initiator of change. Banks provide loans for sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, or any other environment-based projects at a reduced lending rate. A truly digital bank can also help its customers and vendors go paperless by substituting paper-based documents with digital ones. In doing so, banks extend their commitment towards ‘net-zero’ in their operations, suppliers, customers, and the entire supply chain.
Brand Strengthening through ESG Data Analytics
A modern content services platform coupled with data, analytics, and System of Record (SoR) drives ESG metrics measurement and insights. The content services platform can extract data from sources and databases like customers’, suppliers’, social, satellite imagery, HR and government reports, etc., to feed into the analytics platforms to gain powerful insights. An example could be measuring agricultural and green energy loans annually to determine the contribution to CO2 emission reduction. Intersecting this data with country-wide CO2 emissions can help banks measure their ESG impact per year for a country or region.
The Way Forward
A modern content service platform paves the way for the contemporary approach to bringing sustainability to banks. The platform not only enables banks and financial institutions to protect the environment but also extends a helping hand with financial inclusion.
The end of the year is the time to reflect on the past year and to plan for the year ahead. So, amid all the predictions and upcoming trends, here are our top 3 picks that you should consider while driving digital in 2020.
Low Code for Business Speed
Digital requires you to be faster. However, the time spent in translating business needs to business applications sets you back. This is where a low code automation platform comes to the rescue. The platform allows citizen developers to easily develop applications, reducing their dependence on IT. Further, it supports a variety of business needs across mobile apps, workflows, transactional apps, collaboration tools, rules-centric apps, document and content management, data extraction and interpretation, and so on.
Increase your Focus on Customers and their Journeys
Your customers, both internal and external, expect personalized, contextual and responsive experience irrespective of the time, place or channel. One of the reasons most enterprises struggle to achieve digital is because they don’t automate the end-to-end operational processes that underpin customer journeys.
2020 would require you to increase your focus on your customers, their overall journeys with the organization and the processes supporting it. Technologies in intelligent digital automation (BPM) can help by bringing your people, processes, systems, and things together. It offers a consolidated view of customer information and enables you to deliver an omnichannel experience throughout the customer journey.
Choose the Right Technology
With various technology options to choose from, it becomes difficult to identify what your business really needs. To help you make the right decision, here is a snapshot of what to expect from these cutting-edge technologies:
Robotic process automation (RPA): A good option to consider if you are looking to automate your mundane tasks and free up your employees’ bandwidth for more constructive work. Using it along with intelligent digital automation enables end-to-end process automation while allowing for continuous process improvement.
Digital Sensing and Machine Learning: This is your best bet as it taps your customer needs and connects you with them across multiple channels. Further, it analyzes customer sentiments and helps you drive meaningful conversations.
Analytics: With a torrent of information being produced, which will continue to increase, analytics can help you figure out what, why and how while making the most of untapped opportunities.
Mobility: For best results, you need to leverage a mobility framework that banishes all kinds of disconnects. Building mobile apps alone would not help. Opt for a framework that breaks silos, integrates mobile processes with back-end systems, and offers a collaborative mobile environment.
Well, these are our top picks. And, as the year unfolds, many new trends will emerge and many would discontinue. One thing is certain that digital transformation is not an end goal but a journey that requires you to be fast, customer-centric and ahead of the curve.
The world has been forced into remote work. Each country has instituted its own brand of lockdown in an attempt to flatten the curve and a recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article presented data on which nations were and weren’t prepared to deploy a remote workforce.
Researchers scored the social distance and remote operability of 42 countries across the globe. Scoring was based on three factors:
Robustness of key platforms — technology-mediated remote work, e-commerce, digital media and the country’s digital foundations — key to business continuity
Proliferation and resilience of digital payments options to facilitate transactions
Resilience of the internet infrastructure to traffic surges
Check out the results below. Note that higher scores represent better performance along each index.
Digital transformation has been the centerpiece of discussions in tech circles for years. But the coronavirus crisis really transformed “digital transformation” from just an overused buzzword. It became a real-life application of remote work tools. In 2018, 70% of companies had a digital transformation strategy in place or were working on one, and this unprecedented situation exposed just how far along companies — and in this case, countries — are in their digital transformation journey.
The author of the HBR article pointed out several key takeaways from the data:
“There is a divide between the resilient and the fragile: Advanced economies, at the top of the graph have more robust digital platforms, making them better prepared for the pivot to online work than developing economies in the bottom.”
“The United States is ready, but not ready enough: Despite some concerns, the United States is well poised for business continuity, with robust digital platforms and digital payment infrastructure. But with businesses asking employees to work from home, surges in digital traffic have stressed the internet infrastructure.”
“Much of Europe, with some exceptions, suffers from middling robustness of the platforms and vulnerable internet infrastructure. Speeds in much of Europe are much lower than in the U.S. overall, and the infrastructure is older.”
“Some Asian countries have proven to be innovative — and forced reconsideration of long-held assumptions: Being proximate to the origins of the outbreak, some have taken a markedly different approach to using digital technology. South Korea presents an interesting benchmark. Its internet resilience is among the best in the world, as is its use of digital payments, and its platforms are robust.”
How did your homeland fare?
Again, it’s interesting to see the data plotted, as it presents a yardstick by which digital transformation and readiness can be visualized. We contend that the cornerstone of digital transformation and remote work for every organization is information management. Intelligent information management platforms like M-Files allow users to access and manage business-critical information…
No matter where that information is stored — CRM, ERP, network folders, share drives, Salesforce
And no matter where on Earth the user is — home, office, hotel, airport, coffee shop
That seamless experience of working with content from any location with an internet connection is powerful. And with information management platforms, remote work and accessing information doesn’t mean companies have to sacrifice compliance or security.
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