Breaking Down the Barriers to Digital Transformation in Human Centric Operations

Much has been said and written about Digital Transformation. Much less has actually been done about it.

Gartner defines Digital Transformation as “the process of exploiting digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a robust new digital business model”. What isn’t said, and often not well understood, is that there are two fundamental aspects to Digital Transformation.

1. The first is that all processes must be connected from end-to-end, with no digital air gaps. In this “Digital Thread” all links in the operations flow are seamlessly handed off from one system to another. In manufacturing this means from order receipt through shipment there is no paper in the process. Similarly in service operations, from ticket inception to closeout, there is no need for paper.
2. The second is that all of the processes need to be both instrumented and agile. Instrumented so that you can get the data needed to apply Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) analysis to them, and agile so that you can improve them continuously over time.

In high volume manufacturing scenarios, one of the unheralded benefits of automation has been to close the air gap between systems, since it creates a machine-to-machine interaction without human intervention all the while generating the data required to feed to AI/ML systems. However, many business processes have activities that still rely on humans to accomplish and will for quite some time. Whether it is because the activity requires human dexterity, such as some assembly and QA procedures on a factory floor, or complex decision making, such as a field service engineer diagnosing a mechanical problem at a customer site, the cost, complexity, and capabilities of automation often makes it infeasible for a large number of manufacturers and OEMs.

This creates a large barrier to digital transformation because a key component of digital transformation, the data regarding these operations, is only sparsely available. While there are high level data, such as cycle time and yield on the factory floor or after the fact site visit write-ups by a service engineer, the detailed activities of the human worker are still a veritable “black box”. This is an especially challenging for small to mid sized businesses that overwhelmingly rely on human activities.

So where does that leave these companies — do they have no hope of leveraging AI/ML to continuously improve their business?

This is where Augmentir™ comes in. Our Augmented Operations™ platform breaks down that barrier to not only give companies a way to rapidly author augmented work instructions but, when those instructions are executed by the humans in the loop, very fine grained data about the process steps, tools being used, content being accessed, and results being generated are captured in a completely non-intrusive manner and then fed back into the appropriate enterprise systems. Simply put, Augmentir closes the air gap of human operations, enabling humans, and the work they do, to become a fully integrated part of the digital thread.

Augmentir also solves the second, even more challenging, aspect of Digital Transformation. It has has been estimated as 80% of the day to day workload of a data scientist revolves around data cleansing and labeling. Collecting and making sense of the sparse and noisy data streaming back from the activities or humans, the tools they use, and the output they generate has been a huge barrier to taking advantage of the advances in AI/ML technology to optimize human centric operations. The Augmentir platform not only collects the fine grained data, but cleanses, labels it, and then presents it to our embedded AI engine to develop unique insights into your operations. These insights help organizations identify where opportunities for improvement exist and it is this virtuous cycle of continuous improvement that is the hallmark of a “digitally transformed” organization.