Enterprise Intelligence: The digital ethos for business is here to stay


Nicole Bittar
Contributor

It’s an understatement to say that the cyber landscape is ever changing and challenging. 

Asset-intensive industries face significant challenges that limit top-line growth (connected services, time to market, changing demands and seamless customer experience) and bottom-line savings (labour shortages, waste, security costs and sustainability and the environment).  

Yet these operational pressures cannot be surmounted with outdated technologies or work methods. 

To not just survive but thrive, organisational excellence depends on the reliability of new technology for smarter insights and faster decision-making. That’s where Enterprise Intelligence comes in. 

What is Enterprise Intelligence?

From virtual consultations to digital twins, digital technologies are reshaping the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) landscape and redefining consumer expectations. 

At the same time, rising costs are threatening to swamp profits — and providers must tackle new regulations and cyberthreats. 

Changes — and new disruptors — are everywhere you look. Digital transformation is essential to building a more efficient, more agile and more successful CPG business; but it isn’t enough. 

Leaders must embrace new ways of working and set out a strategy that brings together disconnected systems to create powerful, scalable platforms that enable innovation and order of magnitude change. 

Old ways of working simply aren’t up to the challenges of today. They are too expensive, too inflexible and too hard to scale. 

The network is key to changing how a CPG company operates. It enables companies to leverage the latest technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and the Internet of Things, to generate unprecedented insight and make decision-making smarter and faster. Global telecommunications conglomerate Verizon calls this Enterprise Intelligence. 

In CPG organisations, Enterprise Intelligence means tapping the vast quantities of data that often go unused to enable greater personalisation and better forecasting. 

It means making supply chains smarter and more dynamic; able to respond to fluctuations in demand. And it means making manufacturing more efficiently; leveraging the power of automation to reduce downtime; increasing productivity and reducing waste. 

Organisations that achieve Enterprise Intelligence will be more agile, more resilient to events beyond their control, and ultimately more successful. In short, Enterprise Intelligence insights give these organisations the confidence to act and the ability to deliver. 

They will be able to think like a start-up while caring for all the things that enterprises need to worry about. Instead of being concerned with where the next five or 10 per cent saving comes from, they’ll be able to explore new ideas that will increase their revenue 10- or 100-fold. 

And when they find it, they’ll be able to capitalise on it quickly, unencumbered by legacy systems and inflexible networks. 

In the “Enabling Enterprise Intelligence” whitepaper, Verizon looks at the challenges facing CPG organisations and how achieving Enterprise Intelligence can help solve them. 

Why is Enterprise Intelligence so important to the way all businesses should function, and what quantifiable measures does it provide that generate value? 

Connectivity is the key. Studies show that the number of connected IoT devices using cellular technology continues to grow exponentially. 

To leverage the shift of connected products and services as a competitive advantage, organisations must build the IoT and data capabilities and connected platforms to serve and support its users. 

Overcoming cyber obstacles 

Thwarting disruption and implementing long-term cyber solutions depends on an integration of game-changing technologies (multi cloud, next-gen networking, edge compute and machine learning/artificial intelligence). 

Even in this era of increased cyber vigilance and advanced digital capabilities, a vast number of chief executive officers regard digital transformation as “critical” or “absolutely necessary” to organisational development — yet how many still require a digital-first strategy?  

Leading CEOs view technology as key to customer engagement and maintaining or improving margin. 

That’s because only the organisations that transform their core business and enable new business models will succeed in future markets. This means being able to fully explore the wealth of digital opportunities that exist amid industry challenges. 

The future enterprise is digital — and developing it requires the conjoining of disconnected systems to create powerful, modular and cutting-edge solutions. This will enable new functionality, more incisive insights and faster decision-making processes. 

As such, digitisation of organisational processes lies at the heart of embedding Enterprise Intelligence into a business’s structure. 

This story is part of Verizon’s award sponsorship of the InnovationAus 2022 Awards for Excellence.

Do you know more? Contact James Riley via Email.

1 Comment
  1. Digital Koolaid 2 years ago

    Digital transformation is a fashion term, like BoHo. There is no evidence at all that it is “essential to building a more efficient, more agile and more successful … business”. A room full of geeks playing in a “cloud” has nothing at all to do with efficiency (which they can’t spell, how many “f”s was that?). Agile is a term stolen, re-purposed and ultimately striped of all meaning. It suits car salesmen. And the people in the IT department have no idea what business success could be, and could care less provided there’s money for toys. Was this article advertising or analysis? I think the answer lies in this sentence – “It means making supply chains smarter and more dynamic”. Seriously, a smart dynamic chain? I wonder what colours it comes in.

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