Schneider Electric, the global leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation hosted a webinar on the theme of ‘Striving for Operational Resilience Through Digital Services’. The panelists at the session included Anil Chaudhry, Zone President & Managing Director, Schneider Electric India, Debasish Banerjee, Managing Director (Distribution), CESC Limited, Viswanathan R, Senior Director, Capgemini and Puneet Arora, Senior Vice President, JK Cement. Together, the industry leaders delved into the operational vulnerability that businesses could experience in today’s interdependent yet, interconnected environment. They concluded that digital is the way forward to build sustainable operational models, to provide a seamless experience and service to customers and partners.
Sharing his learnings Puneet Arora, Senior Vice President, JK Cement stated, “We all recently witnessed tough few months. With emerging technology and business developments, changing customer expectations, it becomes imperative for any business to adapt to this shift with little disruption as quickly as possible. As a manufacturing company, operational safety and reliability has always been very critical for us. With many of our plants non-operational during this crisis and with physical dependency becoming a huge limitation, digitisation helped us bounce back from an non-working environment to increasing our productivity levels, improving revenues and overall operations.”
Reiterating the value of services in CESC Ltd. Debasish Banerjee, Managing Director (Distribution), said, “Business continuity for any organization depends on how they build operational resilience during and after a crisis. Digital Transformation coupled with adoption of cutting-edge technology and automation has helped us to further improve operational efficiency while delivering customer services in the most convenient and seamless mode. We are working on AI applications for enhanced predictive maintenance.”
Adding to that, Viswanathan R, Senior Director, Capgemini, shared, “We started our digital transformation journey with the Building Management System (BMS) 8 years back. We then adopted, digitization in remote monitoring of equipment to support our critical room environment & this has helped us tackle the present crisis and enabled 93% of our employee workforce to seamlessly work from their homes. Automation of our electrical systems and our equipment has enabled us to transition from preventive to condition based maintenance mode. Equipment analytics not only provide valuable insights to a variety of data, but also helps address manpower limitations and help in initiating timely action to prevent possible energy losses. Through all these advancement in digitization, we were not only able to optimize our spend, but also mitigate business failures.”
The current business challenges have resulted in organisations developing and implementing comprehensive long-terms crisis planning. Customer priorities and touch points are constantly shifting. This technological switch, continuing financial challenges, resource crunch and the massive shift to remote and contact less working, have brought a fresh set of challenges to companies’ infrastructure. Businesses are seeking to utilise service providers who can provide the knowledge and advice around their enterprise digital transformation journey. Businesses are seeing the significance of Digital Services that include remote monitoring and analysis activities to enhance operational processes, improve total cost of ownership, as well as recommendations for predictive and preventative maintenance, in an increasingly contactless world.
In a recent research study titled Maximizing Business and Operational Resilience Through Services in collaboration with IDC, Schneider Electric analysed survey results from over 1,400 business decision makers across multiple respondents, industries and geographic regions, including India. The findings indicate that Services can help businesses accelerate digital transformation, fill the skills gap, manage Asset performance and optimise cybersecurity expertise. Partnering with the right service provider can be transformative to a business’s bottom line. Employing the right digital services strategy can shave as much as 50% from overall maintenance costs, increase energy efficiency by 30% and cut unplanned downtime by 25%.
Emphasizing the value of services for business, in a digitised world, Anil Chaudhry, Zone President & Managing Director, Schneider Electric said, “Today, more than ever, digitisation is on an accelerated path and will be a key differentiator in the future. Strengthening services offers not only enables in harmonising digital touchpoints with customers, but also facilitates an increase in virtual collaboration and helps understand their business goals. A closer strategic alignment between the businesses, the operations and the functions are a must, in this day and age’s.”
