In our final article, we cover the SAVE Framework’s E principle: Enterprise IT. By creating and IT environment that’s adaptable and robust, organizations can successfully deliver services their employees need to remain connected and productive, even amid crises.

IT service delivery has become even more critical as manufacturing companies strive to become agile and adapt more quickly to the changing market conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced IT Service Delivery Models to change significantly, and CIOs are rethinking how to deliver IT while minimizing impact on business.

By utilizing these four streams, manufacturers can reimagine and redefine their enterprise IT functions without disrupting business:

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing involves utilizing resources outside of an enterprise to accomplish specific tasks. In the context of enterprise IT, crowdsourcing offers tangle benefits:

• Accelerated external innovation
• Reimagined business and IT delivery models that enable financial re-engineering
• Improved cost optimization and increased efficiency

Crowdsourcing creates opportunity for new ways of working, enabling co-creation, collaboration, and open innovation. For enterprise IT, the current COVID-19 situation has created three scenarios that on-demand talent can resolve:

• Scenario 1: Enterprises with short-term needs (i.e. dashboards, app development, internal company IT requests, etc.) in Open Technologies like React, Angular, etc.
• Scenario 2: Enterprises with business continuity needs after losing contractors unable to work remotely, creating a shortage of talent. Restrictions on travel and visa policies also contributed to this scenario.
• Scenario 3: Enterprises with long-term needs that adopt crowdsourcing as a part of their overall strategy to avoid future disruptions. The current policy of visa restrictions is also contributing to this scenario.

These scenarios are being addressed by crowdsourcing enterprise IT functions leveraging the Topcoder Crowdsourcing platform. Topcoder has 1.6 million designers, developers, data scientists, and quality assurance engineers, while also providing innovation at scale.

Iteration is key to application development, and app prototypes are ideal for vetting technology and design decisions, generating feedback, and refining requirements before developing production code. Topcoder can provide the platform to generate, evaluate, and test ideas quickly, which is the starting point of the prototyping methodology.

The crowd can be utilized for following IT deliverables:

1. Application Design and Development: Open source technologies application design and development process can be crowdsourced. The crowd uses design and development best practices to deliver industry-leading visual design concepts and high-quality application code.

2. Mobile & Desktop Web App Design & Development: These are fixed price and predefined ready-to-deploy, mobile-optimized web applications. Examples include high-fidelity app designs, clickable prototypes, and tested and installable application code for 15 screens and features.

3. Data Visualization & Dashboards: The Topcoder community can be utilized for the design and development of visualizations and dashboards on platforms like Qlik, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, and Tibco Spotfire. The four-step approach shown below. 

Connected Employee

Today the employee experience within an organization is complex. Daily employee activities involve interacting with numerous applications, helpdesks, and mass communication – all with no personalization. Modern employees are accustomed to services that are as seamless as Amazon’s buying experience, as smart as Google’s search services, as easy as Airbnb’s booking experience, and as personal as Netflix’s recommendation system. However, today’s work from home situation has highlighted how lacking employee experiences truly are.

Enterprises should strive for a Connected Employee solution that is simple, intuitive, and intelligent.

Wipro’s Connected Employee is an employee experience platform that provides the following features:

• System of Engagement & Innovation, enabled across multiple technologies
• Single Universal app with multiple micro apps, providing seamless day-in-the-life employee journeys

Connected Employee helps users by:

• Providing efficient digital onboarding and removing organizational complexity when consuming internal services.
• Accessing information more quickly: documents, policies, people. Universal search puts any document at employees’ fingertips in an instant.
• Reducing time spent on internal transactions such as expenses, approvals, or IT tickets from hours to a few clicks.
• Enabling effective communication with colleagues located anywhere, making remote working truly work.

Remote Expert

According to a recent survey, 90% of organizations indicated that real-time communication is either mission-critical or very important to their workers’ ability to perform effectively^[1]. Remote Expert transforms how plant and field engineers and subject-matter-experts collaborate to get work done.

This specific area has seen minimal and limited investments, resulting in increased asset downtime. The current situation demands a new age solution to address engineer safety, increase productivity and effectiveness, and reduce operation costs.

Wipro’s Remote Expert solution is a collaborative tool providing these features:

• Connect and collaborate with a remote expert via video, audio, messaging, and annotation in real-time.
• Remote experts can see what plant and field engineer see to enhance troubleshooting.
• Augmented reality enables faster diagnosis, improving first-time fix rates.

Agile Delivery

Agile Delivery has emerged as the proven way to deliver digital transformation and respond to changing business needs. It consists of three main phases:

• Design Thinking
• Lean Start-Up
• Agile Development

The Design Thinking phase focuses on researching, strategizing, and ideating to understand potential outcomes and approaches, ultimately arriving at the ideal goal. This stage creates a sense of the final attributes expected in the end product.

The Lean Start-up phase focuses on performing scenario analyses and testing prototypes to identify the best concept. This stage measures prototype concepts against the final expected product.

The Agile Development phase focuses on iterative prototype development. Once the prototype concept is finalized, work begins on the prototype development, and this undergoes multiple iterations to imbibe the feedback received from end-users.

The SAVE Framework Approach:

Wipro strategically partners with clients, helping them evaluated business and IT functions throughout their organization. Through this process, we’re able to collaboratively determine opportunities for enterprises to utilize new ways of working amid each of the four key categories:

Crowdsourcing

• Assess the IT environment to identify a place where this can be a best fit, such as Application Development, Quality Assurance, Dashboard Designing, etc.
• Develop a small Proof of Concept (POC) exercise to see the viability and feasibility of crowdsourcing.
• Identify other opportunities across the enterprise where crowd can be utilized; taking this in initiative at enterprise wide level will show faster returns and adaptation.  

Connected Employee

• Identify the activities which are impacting maximum employees from ticket data, such as filling timesheet (attendance), installing software, raising travel requests, etc.
• Develop pilot for users in one geographic location to understand the utility of Connected Employee platform.
• On successful PoC completion, launch it across the enterprise for all geographies.
• In parallel, target other activities from the ticket data which can be resolved and start adding those features.

Remote Expert

• Identify a plant which has longest asset downtime.
• Perform Remote Expert PoC to resolve equipment maintenance issues.
• Leverage Remote Expert across all the plants after seeing the financial and non-financial benefits.

Agile Delivery

• Utilize Agile Delivery Methodology to develop the product (website, new application, additional functionality, Quality Assurance testing, etc.).
• Compare the performance with other teams.
• Evangelize the delivery model across the enterprise IT.

As the next steps, enterprises must assess the maturity and agility of their IT Service Delivery. By partnering with Wipro to implement new ways of working, enterprises can achieve these improvements:

• Faster reaction times to changing ecosystems and environments
• Improved employee productivity and efficiency
• Minimized business downtime thanks to remote support solutions

If you’re interested in learning more about the SAVE Framework and how you can optimize your manufacturing enterprise, check out the other three articles highlighting this special optimization approach. Or, if you have questions or would like to set up your obligation-free assessment, contact us today to begin.

References:

1. https://lp.servicemax.com/Zinc-WP-Effective-Enterprise-Communication.html

Namit Bhargava

GM & Head of Digital Sales, Digital Transformation

Passionate for results, Namit Bhargava brings innovative strategic perspective on Digital Transformation and Industry X.O themes for superior Customer Experience. Namit is a thought leader for CXO conversations for topics including digital strategy, transformation, new business models, and innovation. 

Connect with Namit on LinkedIn

Savish Sadanandan

Senior Consultant, Digital Solutions

Savish Sadanandan is Senior Consultant focusing on bringing Digital Solutions across the Manufacturing Value Chain. Savish likes to analyze and understand the Client's pain points to identify linchpins which can drive Digital Transformation.

Connect with Savish on LinkedIn