AE Stories

Over the past year and a half, our lives have become more digital than ever before. A huge number of people have been working from home, attending online classes and looking at countless photos and videos on social media. Passwords are essential for all those platforms and channels, and that has caused a new phenomenon: password anxiety. Fortunately, it is something that is easily remedied.

Disruptive conditions, due to external circumstances, require a fundamental digital change. In our  #AENextNormal blog series Stef Devos talked about Accelerating Digital Business with Human Technology, or how people and society will seek a new equilibrium that will be created by a shift towards human technology. To create this shift, data science and artificial intelligence will play a crucial role in automating complex interactions.

These days, achieving true operational excellence is impossible without a thorough understanding of your processes and how they relate to the needs of your staff or customers. Lean processes mean elimination of unnecessary work, reducing errors and focusing on what is really important. It is key to keep costs under control and to level production and service up to speed.

Being truly operational excellent requires, apart from the deep understanding of your processes, a grasp of the constraints and prerequisites they are subject to. Operational excellence is all about having a collaborative focus on your customer’s needs, keeping team members positive and empowered, and continually improving the current activities in the workplace. Effective workforce planning, well organized supply chain operations, preventing production lines from breaking down, efficient use of infrastructure, keeping energy consumption under control, workplace safety… Just to name a few examples.

At AE, we deliver analytics projects on a daily basis and as a result we can experience from the front row that data-driven companies simply perform better than others. As data experts, we can all understand that “data is the new oil” and to put this philosophy into practice we have developed a unique data-driven innovation method to define your next best data product. Sounds interesting right?

Despite the enthusiasm for the digital transformation to a digital manufacturing future, two out of three companies piloting digital manufacturing solutions fail to move into large-scale rollout (Industry Week). Our experience learned us there are 3 dimensions to consider in your journey:

1. Business Dimension
2. Technological Dimension
3. Organisational Dimension

The technological dimension of course is the one considered in most cases. And it is the enabler to a smart factory indeed. However, fail to balance technological actions with a clear focus on business goals, or to embed this new technology into your organisation and the people working in it, and you’re guaranteed not to meet your goals.