Home › Posts tagged resilient

Tag: resilient

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

“Supply chains are under stress,” said Thomas Saueressig, member of the SAP executive board and head of its Product Engineering division, at the recent Hanover Fair. The past few years have shown how prone to failure global logistics chains are, and he added this also has far-reaching consequences for the German manufacturing industry. Digital supply chains, therefore, are needed to be more agile, flexible, resilient, and sustainable. “While companies are aware they need to invest in Industry 4.0 and AI to make their supply chain more resilient, many are still in the pilot phase,” Saueressig said, citing discussions with CEOs and results of a study by Oxford Economics.

Earlier this year, analysts asked nearly 1,000 people around the world in management from 15 industries about the digitization of their supply chains. As a result, managers in manufacturing were more inclined than those in other industries to introduce intelligent technologies on a large scale in order to make better predictions. However, only 36% of the companies surveyed would already use forward-looking analyses in one area of ​​their company.

SAP builds AI into its supply-chain solutions

At the fair, SAP announced it would further expand its logistics chain solutions. SAP Digital Manufacturing, for instance, will be expanded with additional AI tools, which, according to a statement, will allow users to gain AI-supported insights and visual inspections in production to ensure that defective parts are discovered early in the production process and appropriate measures are taken quickly, thus reducing the reject rate and producing higher quality products. The number of complaints would also fall as a result, and the condition and maintenance of systems would be optimized, the provider said.

One of the first adopters of AI-enhanced SAP Digital Manufacturing is Smart Press Shop, a joint venture between Porsche and press manufacturer Schuler. Founded in 2019, the company seized its greenfield opportunity to rethink and redesign the press shop as part of a cloud-first development strategy. Hendrik Rothe, the company’s CEO, spoke of completely paperless production and a fully automated process to configure machines in the production line to cut set-up times nearly in half.

The dark factory dream

According to Rothe, there are many advantages to the digitalization of manufacturing based on the principles of Industry 4.0. In addition to self-optimizing production, continuous traceability, and resource-saving production, smaller batch sizes can also be produced economically. This is an important factor, especially in the automotive industry in the switch to electric vehicles because the quantities are smaller.

Rothe dreams of fully automated dark factories, but there’s still a way to go before those become a reality. According to him, operations are currently at 30 to 40% automation, although the potential varies greatly from area to area. While production itself is fully automated—order-controlled from the SAP system—things are different in the warehouse, as manual processes with forklift drivers continue to work more profitably. “Every automation has to pay off,” says Rothe, and automating transport processes in the warehouse is currently not economical.

Also, while the Smart Press Shop can already carry out its production processes completely paperless, many customers still need paper documents in order to process supplied pressed parts.

Open-data space for manufacturing

Initiatives are currently underway to eliminate fractures in the digital supply chains, and SAP wants to have a say in this. “SAP is in charge of many initiatives in the industry,” says Saueressig, specifically naming two examples. Catena-X, an ecosystem and open-data space, is currently being established in the automotive industry and Saueressig expects the first concrete applications in the current year. And Manufacturing-X is a comparable open-data ecosystem, which will be created in the manufacturing industry.

Around its digital manufacturing, SAP has also expanded other solutions with additional functions. For example, the 3D Product Viewer functions of the SAP Enterprise Product Development solution are now integrated to make all processes, from design and production to service and maintenance, more resilient. So employees in production could display 3D product models in their digital manufacturing dashboard and their work environment, thereby optimizing complex assembly processes. In the SAP Service and Asset mobile application manager, with the help of 3D augmented reality views, field service technicians can carry out maintenance on systems more efficiently to reduce downtimes, SAP says.

Better metrics for sustainable manufacturing

In order to operate their own supply chains more sustainably, users could, in the future, integrate company-specific guidelines for sustainable packaging into the SAP Responsible Design and Production solution. Customers would then have the opportunity to control and monitor the design of packaging more precisely to avoid waste.  

Plus, SAP announced it would expand its integration with EcoVadis, a provider of corporate sustainability ratings. As a result, suppliers could receive more precise sustainability indicators and make their rating status visible in the SAP Business Network. SAP assures its customers this will help buyers see how they can better comply with ​​due diligence and report against the background of new ESG laws. New suppliers can then be selected on the basis of key figures in such a way that sustainability goals in their own business, including the associated value chain, are met.

Digital Transformation, Events, Manufacturing Industry, SAP, Supply Chain Management Software, Vendors and Providers

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Organizations with lagging supply chain maturity are at a disadvantage. They lack digitization – and therefore have more manual work. Plus, there’s little visibility into their operations, often resulting in poor planning and collaboration.

An enterprise can’t help but be inefficient and operate with low resilience and little agility in this environment. Inevitably, the organization will face higher costs, more risk, and deliver subpar services to other enterprises and customers. Moreover, in today’s highly disruptive and competitive environment, competitors will easily surpass them.

To improve both efficiency and resiliency in the supply chain, companies must pay attention and address the gaps and misalignment throughout their supply chains.

The best way to accomplish that, and increase supply chain maturity, is with supply chain convergence. This approach involves aligning systems, data, and processes from across an organization so all departments can successfully collaborate and seamlessly share data.

Yet, supply-chain convergence can seem overwhelming for enterprises with lower supply-chain maturity. Luckily, today’s technology can help companies leap their maturity, and there are specific steps to take to get started.

Six steps enterprises with lower supply-chain maturity can take right now toward supply-chain convergence include:

Understand the silos, gaps, and misalignment in your supply chain. Then, take a thorough inventory and include company leaders and managers from across departments to get a complete picture of the gaps across your organization.Prioritize what gaps need to be reduced. After compiling a thorough list of the gaps and misalignments, choose one or two to address first. Then, consider the ones that, by correcting, would result in the biggest impact on customer service and the bottom line.Simplify processes. Set a goal to eliminate any outdated, redundant systems you might have as well as elaborate processes. Simplification is an important strategic process to keep businesses lean and agile. Find technology and a platform that can make your supply chain more seamless.Outsource non-core functions when feasible. Find an external service provider to help with non-core functions. This is an important step in the simplification process and will allow you to focus on core and competitive functions.Build alignment and synchronization. Encourage alignment across the end-to-end supply chain. Having the right technology in place will help foster synchronization and collaboration.Continue to expand visibility and collaboration throughout the supply chain. Building up your supply chain maturity is a process that takes time. Continue to assess your operations and set achievable goals as you go.

Companies that bolster supply chain maturity through supply chain convergence should expect improvement in several areas, including supplier collaboration, cost management, and new product development.

Strong supplier collaboration helps build supply chain efficiency, resiliency, and sustainability. In addition, strong cost management is a powerful tool to create a competitive advantage jointly with suppliers.

Often, new product development is run inefficiently because of silos in the organization, which impacts time-to-market and business opportunities. However, the business can derive significant value when good collaborative processes and alignment are established between procurement, supply chain, engineering and suppliers.

While, at first, supply-chain convergence might seem daunting for organizations just getting started, by committing to specific steps, you’ll be well on your way to building a resilient, sustainable, and profitable supply chain.

At GEP, we help companies with transformative, holistic supply chain solutions so they can become more agile and resilient. Our end-to-end comprehensive, unified solutions harness technology to change organizations for the better. To find out more, visit GEP.

Supply Chain

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Technology is hardly the only industry experiencing hiring challenges at the moment, but resignations in tech still rank among the highest across all industries, with a 4.5% increase in resignations in 2021 compared with 2020, according to Harvard Business Review.

For the most part, these employees aren’t leaving the industry altogether; they’re moving to companies that can offer them what they want. Flexible schedules and work-life balance? 

Absolutely. Higher salaries? Of course. But one of the primary reasons why people in tech, particularly developers, switch or consider switching roles is because they want more opportunities to learn. Developers don’t want to quit: they want to face new challenges, acquire new skills, and find new ways to solve problems.

Ensuring access to learning and growth opportunities is part of the mandate for tech leaders looking to attract and retain the best people. A culture of continuous learning that encourages developers to upskill and reskill will also give your employees every opportunity to deliver more value to your organization.

Read on to learn how and why expanding access to learning helps you build higher-performing teams and a more inherently resilient organization.

Developers want more learning opportunities — and leadership should listen

Giving developers opportunities to learn has a major, positive impact on hiring, retention, and team performance. According to a Stack Overflow pulse survey, more than 50% of developers would consider leaving a job because it didn’t offer enough chances for learning and growth, while a similar percentage would stick with a role because it did offer these opportunities. And 50% percent of developers report that access to learning opportunities contributes to their happiness at work.

Yet most developers feel they don’t get enough time at work to devote to learning. Via a Twitter poll, Stack Overflow found that, when asked how much time they get at work to learn, nearly half of developers (46%) said “hardly any or none.” Considering that more than 50% of developers would consider leaving a job if it didn’t offer enough learning time, it’s clear that one way to help solve hiring and retention challenges is to give employees more chances to pick up new skills and evolve existing ones.

How can tech leaders and managers solve for this? One key is to create an environment where employees feel psychologically safe investing time in learning and asking for more time when they need it. High-pressure environments tend to emphasize wasted time (“How much time did you waste doing that?”) instead of invested time (“I invested 10 hours this week in learning this”). In this context, plenty of employees are afraid to ask about devoting work time to learning.

Company leadership and team managers can make this easier by consistently communicating the value of learning and modeling a top-down commitment to continuous learning. Executives and senior leaders can share their knowledge with employees through fireside chats and AMAs to underscore the importance of this culture shift. Managers should take the same approach with their teams. You can’t expect your more junior employees to invest time in learning if you haven’t made it clear, at every level of your organization, that learning matters.

Expanding learning opportunities improves team performance and organizational resiliency

Elevating the importance of learning helps sustain performance and competency in your engineering teams. But it does more than improve retention or team-level performance: it also builds organizational resiliency.

Some of your employees are always going to leave: to seek new adventures, to combat burnout or boredom, to make more money. Leadership no longer has the luxury of hiring for a specific skill and then considering that area covered forever. Technology and technology companies are changing too fast for that. Retaining talent is certainly important, but ultimately leaders should be focused on creating organizations that are resilient rather than fragile. The loss of one or two key individuals shouldn’t impede the progress of multiple teams or disrupt the organization as a whole.

There’s nothing you can do to completely eliminate turnover, but you can take steps to make your organization more resilient when turnover inevitably occurs:

Ensure that your teams don’t break when people leave. Incorporating more opportunities to learn into your developers’ working lives helps offset the knowledge and productivity losses that can happen when employees move on, taking their expertise with them. How many times have you heard a variation of this exchange: “How does this system/tool work?” “I don’t know; go ask [expert].” But what happens when that expert leaves? Resilient teams and organizations don’t stumble over the loss of a few key people.Give employees access to the learning opportunities they want. As we’ve said, developers prize roles that allow them to learn on the job. Access to learning opportunities is a major factor they weigh when deciding whether to leave a current job or accept a new one. Expanding learning opportunities for developers makes individual employees happier and more valuable to the organization while increasing organizational resiliency.Avoid asking your high-performers to do all the teaching. Implicitly or explicitly asking your strongest team members to serve as sources of truth and wisdom for your entire team is a bad idea. It sets your experts up for unhappiness and burnout, factors likely to push them out the door. Create a system where both new and seasoned employees can self-serve information so they can unstick themselves when they get stuck.

Four steps to prioritize learning and attract/retain high-performance teams

When it comes to learning, there are four major steps you can take to attract and retain the best talent and increase organizational resiliency.

1. Surface subject matter experts.

Your team has questions? Chances are, someone at your company has answers. There are experts (and potential experts) throughout your organization whose knowledge can eliminate roadblocks and improve processes. Your challenge is to uncover these experts — and plant the seeds for future experts by giving your employees time to learn new skills and investigate new solutions.

Lower the barrier to entry by making it fast, simple, and intuitive for people to contribute to your knowledge platform. Keep in mind that creating asynchronous paths for your employees to find and connect with experts enables knowledge sharing without creating additional distractions or an undue burden for those experts.

How Stack Overflow for Teams surfaces subject matter experts:

Spotlights subject matter experts (SMEs) across teams and departments to connect people with questions to people with answersEnables upskilling and reskilling by allowing teams and individuals to learn from one anotherAsynchronous communication allows employees to ask and answer questions without disrupting their established workflowsQ&A format lowers barriers to contribution and incentivizes users to explore and contribute to knowledge resources

2. Capture and preserve knowledge

Establishing practices to capture and preserve information is essential for making learning scale. The goal is to convert individual learnings and experiences into institutional knowledge that informs best practices so that everyone, and the organization as a whole, can benefit. That knowledge should be easily discoverable and its original context preserved for future knowledge-seekers. To capture and preserve knowledge effectively, you also need to make it easy for users to engage with your knowledge platform.

How Stack Overflow for Teams captures and preserves knowledge:

Collects knowledge continuously to preserve information and context without disrupting developers’ workflowsMakes knowledge searchable, so employees can self-serve answers to their questions and find solutions others have already worked outCompared with technical documentation, Q&A format requires a shorter time investment for both people with questions and people with answers

3. Make information centralized and accessible

The good news is that nobody at your company has to know everything. They just need to know where to find it. After all, knowledge is only valuable if people can locate it when they need it. That’s why knowledge resources should be easy to find, retrieve, and share across teams.

This is particularly critical as your organization scales: new hires can teach themselves the ropes without requiring extensive, synchronous communication with more seasoned employees who already have plenty of responsibilities and find themselves answering the same questions over and over again.

How Stack Overflow for Teams makes information centralized and accessible:

Makes information easy to locate, access, and shareSpeeds up onboarding and shortens time-to-value for new hiresAllows users to make meaningful contributions to knowledge resources without investing huge amounts of time or interrupting their flow state

4. Keep knowledge healthy and resilient

Knowledge isn’t immune to its own kind of tech debt. The major problem with static documentation is that the instant you hit Save, your content has started its steady slide toward being out of date. Like code, regardless of its scale, information must be continually maintained in order to deliver its full value.

Keeping content healthy — that is, fresh, accurate, and up-to-date — is essential. When your knowledge base is outdated or incomplete, employees start to lose trust in your knowledge. 

Once trust starts eroding, people stop contributing to your knowledge platform, and it grows even more outdated. Since SMEs are often largely responsible for ensuring that content is complete, properly edited, and consistently updated, keeping content healthy can be yet another heavy burden on these individuals. That’s why a crowdsourced platform that encourages the community to curate, update, and improve content is so valuable.

How Stack Overflow for Teams keeps knowledge healthy and resilient:

Our Content Health feature intelligently surfaces knowledge that might be outdated, inaccurate, or untrustworthy, encouraging more engagement and ensuring higher-quality knowledge resourcesContent is curated, updated, and maintained by the community, reducing the burden on SMEsThe platform automatically spotlights the most valuable, relevant information as employees vote on the best answers, thereby increasing user confidence in your knowledge

Resiliency requires learning

You can’t build a resilient organization without putting learning at the center of how your teams operate. Not only is offering access to learning and growth opportunities a requirement for attracting and retaining top talent, but fostering a culture of continuous learning protects against knowledge loss, keeps individuals and teams working productively, and encourages employees to develop skills that will make them even more valuable to your organization.

To learn more about Stack Overflow for Teams, visit us here. 

IT Leadership

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

The tenth largest IT service provider in the world, Fujitsu’s more than 124,000 employees can be found on the leading edge of digital transformation in virtually every industry. These include the automotive, financial services, health care, law enforcement, manufacturing, and retail sectors. It is also found in efforts to accelerate environmental, social, and governance efforts.

We recently caught up with Antonio Medianero, director of cloud application at Fujitsu Services España S.A. to learn more about the company’s cloud services and solutions, what it means to be VMware Cloud Verified, and what he sees as the next big thing in cloud. We also took the opportunity to explore Fujitsu’s vision for hybrid IT.

“On the most basic level, as a company we have more than 80 years of experience working in various industries around the world,” says Medianero. “We design, develop, implement, manage and optimize the systems businesses of all kinds need to address their operational, application, and infrastructure needs.”

Fujitsu offers a wide range of consulting services and infrastructure and business continuity solutions. Its team of cloud specialists helps clients deliver services to their customers and achieve strong, seamless operations that reflect the power of the cloud and the innumerable technological gains it makes possible.

“Everything we provide, from rapid advice and guidance to extensive application services, robust platforms, and multi-cloud functionality, reflects the breadth and depth of our teams’ technical and business expertise,” he says. “We scale to meet demand, offer new ways of working, create the foundations for future growth, and design clouds that meet the cost, data protection, compliance, and security requirements of our customers. We believe it’s imperative for enterprises to have the freedom and flexibility to use the right cloud for every task, application, and business need.”

Fujitsu supports all major public clouds. The company’s Fujitsu Cloud is a private cloud based on VMware technology that delivers high levels of security and privacy to ensure that sensitive operations and data are protected. Fujitsu also offers Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Containers-as-a-Service, and Platform-as-a-Service in private cloud environments.

“For hybrid cloud we seamlessly combine public, private, and managed cloud infrastructures with traditional on-premises IT,” he adds. “We can do this on a modest budget to ensure that every customer’s hybrid IT integration is as cost-effective as possible. Our approach provides an intelligent architecture that seamlessly integrates into the existing environment through a management framework that can adapt and evolve as business needs change. It also offers the right mix of services for the rapid deployment of new cloud-based solutions while ensuring strict alignment with governance, compliance, privacy, and security needs – all while enabling data availability across any geography and device.”

Notably, Fujitsu’s PRIMEFLEX is an integrated system that includes pre-configured, pre-tested hybrid cloud-enabled systems – including those for VMware technologies – and all of the services needed to offer a fast path for the development of hybrid data architectures. PRIMEFLEX accelerates the entire process, including design, deployment, and maintenance. It also lets customers easily turn their on-premises infrastructure into a private cloud, introduce cloud pricing models, and connect on-premise systems to the cloud of their choice.

“Our hybrid cloud solutions and services enable growth, reduce risk, lower costs, and increase productivity,” says Medianero. “They also deliver the centralized control that is so important in a world where business units are using the cloud directly.”

Medianero stresses that being VMware Cloud Verified is an important distinction for the Fujitsu team in Spain. It also reflects a longstanding and productive partnership between both companies.

“The VMware Cloud Verified distinction is an important milestone for us because it demonstrates to those in Spain that we comply with, and achieve, the highest standards,” he says. “Fujitsu and VMware’s longstanding partnership also allows us to leverage world-class public and private cloud-based technologies to drive fast-paced continuity strategies. Whether an organization is looking for the performance, resilience, and control of the private cloud or the scale, innovation, and changeability of the public cloud, together we can offer the ideal solutions, services, and seamless integration needed to fully support those efforts and the work of employees today and tomorrow.”

Learn more about Fujitsu Spain and its partnership with VMware here or review success stories from across the globe.

Cloud Management, IT Leadership