The urgency
Industry innovation leaders are launching everything from new business models to highly connected ecosystems to smart factories. Thus, every decision to put off launching a digital transformation initiative, for whatever reason, puts that company months behind its traditional competitors — and makes them less able to respond to new competitors.
To get the most out of the big-bet initiatives shown above requires a different approach to implementing change. Initiatives in one area often don’t fully deliver on their potential if they aren’t matched with advances in another big-bet category. For instance, you may have done a brilliant job on supply chain transformation but haven’t implemented the talent-acquisition strategy that attracts the people whose innovative strategies will maximize ROI from your advanced supply chain.
The way forward
If there is one overarching theme to the way industrial company leaders are looking at the big bets, it’s that they are making a strategic move from a business-to-business (B2B) framework toward being more business-to-customer (B2C). You can see how this plays out in each of the big bets — and how each of them is interlaced with the others.
Customer connectivity
Customer expectations have changed. They want that same 5 p.m.-to-9 p.m. at-home experience in their 9-to-5 workplace environment. Thus, interactivity, intelligence and awareness have become key aspects of industrial companies’ increasingly customer-centric engagement model. This brings digital capabilities into play, to collaborate with business partners.
Such cross-pollination leads to the rapid emergence of new business models out of necessity: digitally enabled disrupters, often from outside the sector, are forcing industrial companies to think and act differently. This, in turn, puts new stressors on the value chain, which will fragment as industries converge and new the way forward economies emerge.
Supply chain reinvention
Your supply chain is not just an operational function — it’s a customer experience. Today’s supply chains are no longer linear, but complex ecosystems. They’ve migrated from on-premises to the cloud, which alters the whole notion of collaboration, with suppliers, with other third parties, even with customers.
With cloud-based data, the supply chain is better connected to more intelligence derived from data and therefore more responsive; it’s easier to build your ecosystem and adjust it on-demand. Communications are multidirectional, with information-sharing throughout the entire ecosystem. Digital enablers support the end-to-end process improvement that make enhanced customer responsiveness possible, yet the increase in connectivity also threatens supply chain resilience.