When it comes to business innovation, any delay in investing in smarter infrastructure and technologies can mean a loss of competitive advantage. Agility and continuous improvement are critical to staying relevant and staying ahead.

Transformation is never easy. Attitudes toward change can make innovation difficult. Poor visibility into how your manufacturing is running can have a dramatic impact on forecasting and analysis, as well as make new technologies difficult to integrate. But there is good news: Having reliable data can help with making decisions around what new technologies to invest in much easier. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help you decide where to focus your efforts and make your journey to digital transformation much smoother. Better data can help in many other ways, too, including:

• Identifying areas for transformation and improvement, providing clear benchmarks for return on investment (ROI) and impact measurement
• Reducing waste and reporting on your progress against sustainability and environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals
• Driving new product development and customer growth by leveraging AI solutions and Industrial Internet of Things devices

Use data to identify areas for improvement.

Being an agent of change in any organisation is never easy. It’s especially difficult when your business is capital-intensive and resistant to moving away from legacy infrastructure and technologies. That’s why you need robust, reliable data at your fingertips. Data that can help you predict, model and forecast any changes before they actually happen.

By investing in technology, you can make future innovation easier by using ML, digital twins and predictive analytics to provide benchmarks and predictions to measure success and ROI. It can help you know exactly what impact new technologies will have on your business, and take guesswork out of investment decisions—satisfying the most risk-averse stakeholders.

Use data to become a leader in sustainable manufacturing.

Data-led insights can give manufacturers more control over their material’s provenance, resource usage and a greater understanding of their productivity challenges.

With robust, real-time data, you can get a clearer picture of where you can reduce waste and energy use. This can contribute to ESG goals.

This can help reduce costs, too. By investing in digital transformation, you could:

• Improve the performance of machines and workers, and boost labour productivity by 15% to 30%¹
• Move toward leaner, even lights-off, manufacturing by leveraging automation
• Augment your workforce with assistive systems and cobots, to increase productivity, reduce errors and promote safety
• Model, avoid and mitigate crises such as supply chain shortages, costly delays and missed shipments using digital twins

Combining internal data with external information—including weather information, economic indicators and demographic data—and applying ML can deliver insight that looks like intuition. But should the worst happen, they can help mitigate the costs and accelerate recovery.

Use data to drive new product and customer growth.

Drive new product and customer growth by using data from  AI, ML, autonomous guided vehicles and other cutting-edge technologies to:

• Boost efficiency and productivity by automating labour-intensive processes and functions, enabling lights-out manufacturing and a leaner workforce
• Increase customer satisfaction by enabling a consistently high quality of product
• Enable higher output and reduced waste by continually improving

Innovation doesn’t have to be disruptive. By making it more data-driven, you can clearly show people the benefits of harnessing new technologies, reducing cultural resistance to change.

We understand that to make innovation easier, visibility means everything. Having reliable, real-time data to bolster key innovation and change-based decisions throughout your business can be the difference between buy-in and staying still. This goes from security and supply chain efficiency all the way through to new machinery for the factory floor. To guide your business through the digital transformation journey, you need to be confident you can always see exactly what you’re working with.

Verizon has worked with many manufacturers and helped them get more from their data. Our industry experts have decades of relevant experience, enabling them to provide practical and effective advice. Our global network, computing and security expertise and extensive ecosystem can help you put those ideas into practice. We can help you de-risk transformation, accelerate change and achieve the promise of Industry 4.0.