In any given year, businesses regularly change their priorities to meet the impact of unexpected situations. As businesses are figuring out how to pivot from what had been their 2020 priorities, the current global situation has made one thing clear―there is a lot of re-planning that now needs to be done. According to IDC’s Manufacturing Resiliency in the Age of COVID-19, “Natural disasters, political uncertainty, and the emergence of incapacitating diseases are no longer risks to mitigate but constants to embrace as an integrated part of business as usual.” Well, so much for the planning process.
Businesses have always looked to their innovation capability to manage work, speed up processes, and reduce costs while maintaining competitive advantages and driving margins. With the current business landscape, a company’s innovation capability must also support changing business priorities at a faster pace than ever before. To complicate matters, departmental budgets and available resources are expected to fluctuate throughout the year. The ability of an organization to create and implement innovative solutions to match changing business processes will play a major role in a company’s success.
There are some very interesting examples of companies that have shown the world how this is done. For example DENSO Corporation, a global automotive components manufacturer was able to pivot and produce thousands of critical face shields for health care workers in response to COVID-19. Within three days, DENSO’s employees in Maryville designed, modified, produced, and donated 30 prototype face shields to Blount Memorial Hospital. The Maryville facility is now ramping up to maximize the number of shields it can produce to help with medical equipment shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Very impressive.
A recent Forbes article, How CIOs Should Reroute Digital Transformation In The COVID-19 Crisis, discussed the need for digital transformation initiatives in light of recent events. In the article, it makes clear that “Unlike past downturns, when digital technologies were not as crucial to competitive advantage, these initiatives are central this time. Given first mover advantage in the digital world, companies cannot run the risk of falling behind their competitors.” Assuming that existing digital transformation programs will most likely continue, Forbes asks, “what is the best path forward to scale and value?”
The short answer is that having the right technology in place is critical. The combination of a flexible product development platform, utilizing a cloud environment to support fast innovation, will give an organization the tools necessary to pivot fast and create a sustainable solution. What is important with this footprint is that solutions can be built over time to manage costs and resource availability, allowing the business to control the pace of investments. Functionality can be developed based on business value and implemented in segments to realize financial benefits while limiting financial investments.
What platform features are necessary to ensure resiliency in your solutions?
- Using an open platform will ensure your solution can be easily integrated into existing enterprise solutions. This will support growth and flexibility as the application architecture changes over time.
- Platforms that leverage a single integrated data model create data integrity for a solution that will grow as additional functionality is added over time to enhance end-to-end processes.
- Low-code modeling engines tied to existing services ensure the solution will be flexible for future business changes without creating the overhead of significant code development.
- A cloud solution will add value by managing upfront costs and scalability as the solution grows. The usage of managed cloud services would add implementation speed and flexibility to a solution without requiring additional resources.
- For sustainability, your innovation platform needs to be easily upgradable to take advantage of new technology.
For over twenty years, Aras has provided businesses with the most resilient product development platform in the industry. The open, cloud-ready environment provides users the ability to “Build with Aras” by customizing the Aras applications or building new solutions to meet whatever specific requirements an organization may have.
Aras Innovator provides a rich set of platform services that works with the industrial low-code modeling engine to develop enterprise applications fast with limited code development. Using the Aras platform and its service-oriented architecture to build your new applications, upgradability is guaranteed. As a matter of fact, with an Aras subscription, all upgrades are performed free by the Aras team.
The Aras platform and applications are freely downloadable so you can get started evaluating Aras Innovator at any time.
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For more on the Aras Platform, read the Aras Resilient Platform White Paper or The Resilient Platform: Three Essential Characteristics eBook.