Industrial Automation Magazine India

Implementing AI solutions is an investment, not an expenditure

Published on : Tuesday 08-02-2022

Raj Ravuri, Director, Industry Advisor-Manufacturing, Salesforce India.

Which forthcoming advances in technology will impact industrial automation?
The pace of digital change shows no sign of slowing as we accelerate towards 2022. Organisations must meet the expectations of their employees and customers, or risk falling behind their competitors. This is reflected in the technology trends emerging across every industry, all of which are geared toward delivering improved user experiences and innovation at speed. 
 
Specific to Manufacturing, the ability to understand the near term demand picture is critical to an effective response, which includes - ensuring that operations and staffing levels are right-sized for the current environment, while also automating some of the ongoing processes. In addition, considering long term impact, business leaders are reconfiguring the global supply chain, driving collaborative innovation and looking to a strategy that combines integration, API management, and automation to enable the composable business and increase the speed of work. Additionally, harnessing digital capabilities and data more effectively than ever will be essential to create connected experiences across a distributed workforce.  
 
2022 will be a year of composability, where organisations increasingly shift to agile architectures that enable both business and IT teams to harness digital capabilities more effectively — and accelerate customer and employee experiences to a whole new level.
 
3M, a global manufacturer of masks and respirators to healthcare providers and organisations, was faced with a shortage of supply since the outbreak of Covid. The company’s personal protective equipment team was inundated with reports of scammers trying to profit from the crisis by attempting to sell counterfeit or non-existent products, or charging grossly inflated prices. 3M harnessed the power of the connected Customer 360 to 3M to prevent fraud and help their sales and service teams operate efficiently and continue to drive business in a remote environment. 
 
How are manufacturing industries leveraging AI/ML? How do automation controllers provide the necessary platform?
With data becoming increasingly accessible, more companies in the manufacturing industry are leveraging AI and ML to enable scenario planning, demand forecasting, and inventory positioning, and also increase accuracy and reduce time to complete a task. Companies within the manufacturing sector too are now looking to leverage technology (like chatbots or other AI-driven comms tools) to help minimise response-time delay without added stress on the already-depleting and overwhelmed staff. 
 
Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud is a solution designed from the ground up with endless optionality and expandability. It delivers simple, click-based configuration out of the box, and evolves as your organisation adapts and your needs change. From manual data uploads to full system integration, and from basic reporting to AI-enabled analytics, Salesforce can meet your needs wherever they begin and keep up with wherever they’re going. For instance, Volkswagen Group Australia has 104 dealerships across the country as well as contact centres. Salesforce helps to ensure a consistent customer experience across all locations and touchpoints. It provides employees with shared data and efficient processes. It also provides analytics and intelligence to navigate customers to the right solutions. 
 
One crucial aspect that businesses are discovering fast in a post-pandemic world, is that there are serious knock-on effects across all industries, especially with regard to supply chains. The ongoing crisis calls for constant communication across customers, dealers, distributors, logistics providers and part suppliers to help understand and address supply chain and operations issues as they arise. Access to data on the Tableau dashboard can help organisations with supply chain analysis by exposing critical problems and opportunities: Analyse shipping scheduling. Improve transportation and inventory planning. Track just-in-time delivery metrics and more.
 
The integration of analytics tools, on top of existing ERP and supply chain data sources, can bypass traditional supply chain systems that take months or years to implement in order to achieve short term visibility. These tools can help improve production and plant performance, enhance sales and operations planning, mobilise the supply chain, and actively respond and react to customer feedback in real-time. 
 
How can AI and ML help companies create predictive models, analyse operations, make accurate forecasts and automate supply chains?
A major factor in building supply chain resilience is digital transformation. Across all industries, Cloud-based applications AI/ML, IoT and automation are coming together to transform how businesses operate and inter-operate. At Salesforce, we have many of the tools you need for a holistic view of the supply chain – whether it’s remote customer engagement and service support, data analytics for customer insights or collaboration tools we can help manage any supply chain issues in near real-time as they arise.
 
Organisations need to act decisively now to integrate resilience into your supply chain to ensure against disruption from the next shock whenever it arrives. It must become second nature for manufacturers, pharma and other industries to have end-to-end insight across the entire supply chain. This ensures that manufacturers can respond to any risk of disruption before it happens. 
 
The full potential of AI and ML is realised only when the scale of operations is big enough. How can the average SME benefit with their limited resources?
SMB leaders are actively looking to adopt technology that strengthens their strategy. And Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a sine qua non in this regard. Many enterprises are already adopting it. In fact, more Indian enterprises are considering AI adoption (24%) compared to the global average (15%). So, AI is now a business imperative for all companies – including SMBs – that plan to stay relevant and competitive. SMBs themselves are looking to digitise customer interactions, workflows, and internal communications, and also to optimise teams as considerations for the future of business in a new normal. 
 
While most SMB leaders don’t dispute the benefits of AI, many cite lack of knowledge, investment, and guidance as the top challenges in AI adoption. Their hesitation to adopt AI is increased due to the myths surrounding its use in small businesses. The biggest being that AI is only for big businesses. AI solutions can offer significant process improvements for all businesses, irrespective of size. In fact, since SMBs operate with limited budgets and talent, AI tools can augment their efforts with quick and automated actionable insights, forecasts, and next-step recommendations. For instance, while SMBs are eager to revive revenues, high-performing sales professionals with a proven record of bringing closed deals home are quite expensive to hire. 
 
Secondly, AI doesn’t require complex technical knowledge. Sophisticated AI tools reduce operational complexities and require little to no human intervention. The right AI solutions are rather intuitive and can be seamlessly built into a company’s service channels and CRM data. Take Service Cloud Einstein, for instance, Salesforce’s AI assistant for customer service teams. This AI assistant makes the use of AI in customer service super-easy while elevating customer service experience and maximising agent productivity.
 
Lastly, SMBs should remember, implementing AI solutions is an investment, not an expenditure. The key lies in identifying the most viable AI use cases and compelling metrics to measure the impact. For instance, customer experience and customer trust became critical to business success in the pandemic’s aftermath. And here's where personalised marketing campaigns that help forge 1-to-1 customer relationships make for a promising AI use case. While larger enterprises spend big bucks to attract customer attention with their advertising and marketing campaigns, SMBs can use AI to launch effective digital marketing campaigns. With Einstein for Marketing for instance, marketers can use the AI-powered Marketing Cloud that lets marketing teams: Discover the right audience, know customers better, recommend the most relevant products and present customers with the next best action or offer. With such an intelligent solution, marketers can optimise their marketing campaigns, make marketing more targeted and thus, boost RoI.
 
The human element remains critical in the deployment of new technologies. How is skill development to be planned in a scenario of not yet mature technological advances?
We partnered with Pulse Research and found that 99% of people leaders see eye-to-eye when it comes to digital transformation efforts across industries. Businesses need to drive digital transformation by investing in the best asset: people. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and other emerging technologies are happening in ever shorter cycles, changing the very nature of the jobs that need to be done – and the skills needed to do them – faster than ever before. A short-term solution to filling these skills gaps would be for companies to pay a premium to acquire talent with skills in demand. But even if they can find people with the right skills and are happy to bear the cost, it will not help in a few years when those new skills are no longer needed. To address the problem, companies must invest more in enabling their workforce to reskill – starting now. Timing is critical. 
 
The World Economic Forum estimates that more than half (54%) of all employees will require significant reskilling by 2022, but the problem is likely to be even more acute in some regions. What is required is a holistic solution that prioritises new approaches to skills development within an existing workforce and in previously untapped talent pools. Salesforce has developed its own free, gamified online learning platform, Trailhead, which allows users to take control of their own training and develop the skills they’ll need in the future.
 
In India, L&T Realty, the real estate development arm of engineering and construction firm Larsen & Toubro used the lockdown to empower its teams to enhance their CRM knowledge and skills through Salesforce’s learning platform, Trailhead. At the time, the company was in the process of implementing Salesforce and the customer experience head decided it was the best time to upskill. Trailhead allows their employees to spend time at home constructively, networking with other CRM practitioners and acquiring a new set of skills in a fun and engaging way. Driven by purpose and implemented with urgency, similar initiatives can be spun up not only to bridge today’s digital skills gaps and also to tackle global challenges such as climate change. 
 
The decisions companies make now to solve the digital skills gap will echo for a generation. A commitment to bridging the widening digital skills gap is fundamental to our world’s future success and prosperity. And doing so in a manner that promotes equity and effectively leverages untapped talent within the workforce.
 
(The views expressed in interviews are personal, not necessarily of the organisations represented)
  
Rajkumar Ravuri is a Director and Manufacturing Industry Advisor at Salesforce based in India. He is responsible for Customer CXO advisory for transformational initiatives, and the Go-To-Market strategy for Manufacturing sector across India, and Asia Pacific region. Raj has 25+ years of experience in the IT industry across Salesforce, Wipro, KPMG Consulting, etc., advising Fortune 500 organisations across the Manufacturing sector in USA, Europe, and Asia Pacific. He has had executive leadership training with Stanford University, is a Mechanical engineering graduate from Osmania University. He has delivered key note sessions and/or been invited as an expert panel member at major industry events in Berlin, Detroit, World Economic Forum New York, Hannover Messe, Oracle Open World, India Auto Aftermarket Forum, etc.