Digital Transformation Journey & Future Road Map

Cosmo Films is working on Cloud First policy from last few years and benefits of its strategy started reflecting on our business. Today we are 100 % on cloud and have time to focus on solving the business issues rather than just fighting to keeps the light on. I remember earlier companies were not ready to go on cloud but today most of them are going on cloud with just two drivers one is the security & second is the speed of deployment. Cost may be the factor for some of them but in today’s time I feel speed & security is more important than anything else.

New Technologies are challenging the old business models, old & proven methods are becoming obsolete as they are not designed to respond with the speed required in today’s time to meet the customer expectations. More and more automations are happening day by day to help business requirements and success of this automation at one company provoking other companies to adopt it so that they are not out of the growth race. Many studies have been done & established the fact that more Digital will bring 3X growth compare to the companies who are not adopting it.

New technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & Internet of Things (IOT) are getting matured. Industry 4.0 helping operational automations & going beyond just the process automations. It has improved operational efficiencies which are helping organizations growing faster & setting new benchmark of customer satisfaction to customer delight. Robotics has helped organizations to automate the process which were very complex in nature & repetitive at the same. RPA are getting used as the first stage automations tools in organizations & it is helping IT to gain the trust of Management which in turn helped to get more budgets from them along with support & commitment. Success stories videos of automations getting published on various platforms helping others to co-relate & building business cases in their respective organizations.

Many times organizations are facing the challenges of required talent issues in market and failing to achieve the business goals. Vendor selection has become more critical than earlier due to complexity involved into these projects and experts not available inside of these technologies. I am sure in coming days this issue will get fixed significantly to bridge the demand & supply gap as was these case with other technologies in past.

In Cosmo Films, We have taken several steps which have helped us a lot. For example all the payments related to customers, Vendors and employees are automated and no cheques are accepted or given to them. This automation of ERP, CRM & HRMS with Bank Interface has reduced the time from days to few minutes and accuracy has gone up significantly. Automation of Master Data without manual interventions along with all checks has reduced response time from many days to few minutes to all our internal customers. Audit is another area in which due to automations Business risks are getting eliminated with very low cost and Management gets happy as now it is not depend on manual interventions. It also helps to bring accuracy in reports. For example, at the end of month, all the open production orders get closed, PR open beyond a time get closed automatically, Open PO’s get closed, Customers have not done any business transactions in a defined period gets blocked, a lot of transactions like this are automated and has no or very less manual interactions which helps business to eliminate a lot of risk. We have vision to automate our offline process to online process for example quality testing happens post production but if we can do it at the time of production can become a game changer for us. We have identified many more such process and certain to achieve high level automations with the help of new technologies.

Any Automation which is done with no change or very less change in people practices or helping them to remove the non-value added activities are seemed to be more successful. If we start automation project with big practice changes chances of failure are very high. We shall explore doing the pilot projects with start-up echo system as they may help to get quick success with low budgets.

IOT Projects are driving lot of automations on shop floor and helping organizations to capturing key inputs without doing implementations of complete MES systems. For Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) it was not possible to adopt Manufacturing Execution System (MES) systems due to high cost & non availability of interfaces with old or nonstandard equipment’s. IOT has helped lot of such organizations. IOT can be implemented for a particular process or for a particular function. Block Chain is enhancing the trust and helping to build more values throughout the supply chain, for example if a diabetic person buying the insulin, he can scan the QR code to check whether his packet temperature was maintained throughout the supply chain post manufacturing to warehouse to dealer to wholesaler to retail medical store or not.

All the technologies and its usage has to improve the people lives as this is one of the fundamental which I strongly believe driving all the technologies advancements. New Technologies will keep emerging as well as customer expectations. This is a journey, let’s begin our one.

About the Author

Jagdip Kumar is Head-IT at Cosmo Films Limited – a global leader in speciality films for packaging, lamination and labeling applications. He has a wide-ranging experience of completing large IT projects in transforming business and implementing ERPs in various industry domains. He is a digital transformation professional having hands-on expertise across various domains including Polyester, Textile, Automotive, BOPP & Thermal.