Be Digital. Faster.

• Digital Factory
• Article

Czech economy, in its large portion, is oriented to the German market, and in the last year, the Czech Republic became one of top 10 trade partners of Germany. We as an IT company focusing on production and logistics digitization consider this market to be pivotal, too, representing in fact one of the gates to the global world. We look at the digital transformation from the perspective of a Digital Factory, and Digital Delivery.

Germany is the biggest strategic propagator and implementer of so called digital transformation of industry. Mrs. Ilse Aigner, Bavarian state minister for economy, media, energetics and technologies, held a speech in Prague at the beginning of May this year, which was part of this year’s regular member meeting of ČNOPK in Prague. We were there, too. Ilse Aigner dedicated her entire speech to one challenge only – digitization. She said, among others: “Digitization and Europe – those are two sides of a single coin. Europe needs digitization and digital economy needs Europe. Digitization is a mega trend unstoppable on country borders.”

Digital transformation of an enterprise – making things in a different manner

Let us take the digitization topic, many times discussed and presented, and try to look at it from another perspective. Gartner, a research and consulting company, uses quite fitting definition of digitization or digital transformation, differentiating it from automation: digital transformation of an enterprise means making things in a different manner – it lies in creating quite new business models that utilise combination of digital technologies, which blur the border between physical and virtual reality. It is not a mere process automation or inclusion of technological components into an existing process. New vision of the Aimtec company with the motto – Be Digital. Faster. – is based not only on automation, but also on digitization. The core lies in digital transformation of our customer’s business on one side (Digital Factory pillar), and digital transformation of our own processes on the other hand, like management of solutions, projects and services (Digital Delivery pillar). In fact, the Digital Factory pillar is the major topic in this AIMagazine, such as depicted in the Sonar Logistics Concept text on page 5.

Digital Delivery, or Project for One Third of Time

It was the view of the digitization in terms of Gartner’s definition of “doing things in a different manner”, what gave us space enough to start thinking of completely new approaches to the delivery of projects. How to resolve the everlasting problem when the customer understands the target concept (blueprint) in a different manner than we do? How to eliminate time losses during writing, handover and approval of the target concept?

Reaching the first prototype and testing sooner than in 1–2 months since the project startup? Often, a customer is capable of expressing real needs only using a prototype. How to eliminate ineffective time spent updating the system process documentation? How to test the whole system correctly before putting it in service, and how to eliminate the costs connected with their elimination? And mainly, how to cope with the fact that the requirements defined with customer during analysis, operational startup, or even prototyping, are no more valid? So, how to make things in a fundamentally different manner? We have set a goal to shorten each project processing time to one third of the present duration, such as from three to one month. With such a requirement, we now must think of fundamental changes, e.g. how to:

• Provide a functional prototype two weeks after the analysis, instead of theoretical discussions with the customer about the target concept, so that the customer can “touch” the prototype. Make the customer have a clear idea, how the new processes will look like specifically. Then, the customer can confirm with us, feeling good about it, that the proposed solution actually meets his expectations, or give us relevant
• Prepare the application user interface intuitive enough, so that no user documentation is required. In addition, the user will be able to use the application practically much sooner.
• Adjust testing correctly – software robots will test the system after every change, and other robots will prepare set of data for the prototype user testing.

In the connection with the said above, and in the connection with ten other innovations within the Digital Delivery, we have started internal projects, some of them already bringing the first results.

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