Digital transformation sales for engineering

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many of you probably noticed that our company is talking about digital transformation a lot recently it's not a brand new concept most companies are already aware of digital transformation and have been for years as they've tended to view it as a long-term goal to gradually work toward but now it's really been picking up more momentum a lot of folks may not have recognized the urgent need for digital transformation before the covid pandemic but they're certainly seeing it now that's why there's a large scale velocity of companies accelerating their digital transformation journey and inductive automation as a major catalyst in this movement but before we talk about why ignition's ideal for accelerating digital transformation let's quickly clarify what digital transformation really is about so we're going to understand what we should be accelerating toward digital transformation obviously has a lot to do with technology but it's not about technology for technology's sake or just putting new technologies on top of old ones rather it's really more of a comprehensive shift in the way that we do business it's all about finding where there's room to improve our operations then making those improvements and an intentional methodological and measurable way leveraging modern technologies like cloud big data edge and iiot therefore we should really think about digital transformation in terms of the different components and we have inductive automation have split it up into three different sections we've worked with a lot of companies and found that there are some consistencies in terms of what different areas people need to focus on so if you slice and dice that you can break it down into processes people and programs in terms of processes we should really look at existing processes and ask how can we streamline them how can we rethink them using digital technologies can we create new processes where necessary how do we overcome entrenched ways of doing things if you think about people think about the people inside the organization how do we increase communication and collaboration could we improve our decision making by making data more widely available how will we teach our people new skills how can technology help us improve the user experience if you think about processes processes are basically how a business is running people are the ones who are making decisions as to which processes to actually employ how to employ those processes and making decisions where processes don't exist and then the last piece right here is programs i should really view those programs or our technology and you know people process programs as three ps it's easy to remember the programs could also be labeled technology there so we should really review those programs and think about the following how can we improve operational efficiency and increase savings how do we remove the limits imposed by outdated technology and how will we navigate compatibility issues and avoid disruption or downtime all three of these pieces are very important we'll be focusing for most of the rest of the webinar on the program section or the technology but make sure you don't lose sight of processes and people effective digital transformation really requires all three of those parts and so let me talk a little bit about something that's uh more abstract here so i have a young daughter and if i wanted to build her a playhouse there would be a few steps i could get the wood have it shipped put in the backyard and have it ready to go but if i didn't have any tools it would be really impossible to build it at least using modern efficient construction techniques that'd be sitting in the back with a bunch of cut pieces of wood not knowing what to do or how to put them together if i didn't have any nails if i didn't have a hammer you need tools in order to do things in modern ways and you know it's interesting i have a staple gun that was passed down to me by my father it worked great but as soon as i ran out of staples i went to the store to try to get more staples and well you guess where this is going they didn't have any staples that were the right size it was a special staple size that isn't the standard and isn't available and for me it made the tool practically useless going forward this problem that i'm describing exists in the software industry as well proprietary tools that don't use standards can make life difficult for everyone and i really like this analogy because i think that it brings it home why having standards why having standard technologies and why having standards sets of programs and and the technology behind them is really important and brings it home in a way that is relatable for anyone who's ever tried to build something so eric i wanted to ask you a question throw this over your way as an integrator do you have any comments about the important of having the right digital tools for digital transformation yeah absolutely i mean using standard tools within a tool set uh is essential and so typically what i'm looking for in a tool set is depth extensibility integration capabilities protocols and and things like that that are just standard that you can use out of the box to integrate with other things because nobody wants a solution that exists in a silo what i find is that depth usually comes at the cost of accessibility which is why i've spent a lot of time in c but ignition does a great job of meeting people where they're at to get them off the ground running quickly and still enabling them to go deeper and dive deeper and build cooler things as they progress in the stack so that's kind of what i liked about it thanks eric um arlen did you have anything you wanted to add to that well yeah i mean i think when we talk about digital transformation there's this propensity that oh it's digital transformation therefore we must go write code and you know we're all about and part of this webinar is about you know tools on platforms not coding on operating systems so i think the more that we can use the tools that ignition as a platform i mean forget about whether it's skater hmi or dcs or whatever it's really about the tools on a platform that we're going to leverage thanks ireland yeah it's you know it's interesting to me too that eric you mentioned c sharpened there and i've definitely programmed my fair share of things in c sharp i come from a very technical background and you know the the difference between building something using tools versus building something using code using basically going really low level as opposed to using tools to to build something in a more rapid way is something that originally drew me to inductive automation and something that made me want to work for for inductive automation and have a hand inside ignition so you're you're speaking you're a man after my own heart there so thanks guys