Digital transformation: Manufacturer's success with focus on people, process, technology

I recently had the opportunity to scope and implement a digital transformation (DX) project at a midsize engineer to order manufacturing organization. The objective as defined by the team was to improve their ability to process an increasing number of engineered orders while maintaining the same staff and intellectual property that made this company's product offering unique. The goal of the DX was to keep doing what they do best, in terms of engineered services, but become more efficient in the approach by leveraging information technology.

There are many definitions about what DX is, what it is about, and how you should approach DX. In this article, I will cover three primary areas that we focused on for DX as part of the development and deployment of the technology solution so that the company gained broad acceptance.

The focus at this manufacturing organization, as at many firms, is on three areas when it comes to IT: People, Process, and Technology. Each of these areas works together, hand in hand, and they must all be accounted for in new IT investments to deliver DX to your organization.

People

People are the most important component of any organization today. Within this manufacturing firm, we determined there are many generations of employees that have either grown up with technology or experienced its many forms (mainframe, client/server, web, mobile) in the past few decades.

When we looked at the team, one size did not fit all in terms of education, knowledge, training and individual approaches to learning new topics. Therefore, we had to understand the optimal way to inform the employees about how this new solution changes (or transforms) the way in which they work. We experimented with different approaches such as ...