Across Western Europe, we have an aging population. Family businesses and companies that have been in business for decades notice the problem the most:
- The current staff is getting older and struggling to keep up with IT.
- Young people are stepping into engineering less and less often, and when they do, they study longer and more focused on management. So fewer new inflows.
The result: growth is hampered by a lack of well-trained staff.
So, how do you capture the knowledge and experience of professionals who know how to go through sometimes 30+ process steps to arrive at a final product?
The answer is simple, but not easy: simplify processes.
Only then can you start thinking about automating and applying algorithms.
But that’s not all – for both problems mentioned above, there are two more answers.
- To get current employees to go along with IT, you have to make the system more user-friendly. Fewer clicks, fewer actions and easier workflows. No long spreadsheets, but simple tablet apps etc. For example, through modern shopfloor control.
- Attract younger employees: make your company more modern, offer better work arrangements, give more freedom to experiment and offer prospects for several years of development to that management level.
The point is:
Craftsmanship is the core of your business, but it must become modern and digital.
And to digitize something, you first have to streamline workflows. A bad analog process becomes a bad digital process if you don’t redesign it. A flashy website does not replace a culture change. And you don’t arrange a culture change on Friday afternoon.
In short, effective digital transformation changes the core of the business and is more than just going from paper to digital.
