Digital

In the early 1980s the satirical British TV comedy, Not the Nine O’Clock News, aired a spoof commercial featuring a motor industry assembly line manned entirely by men in overalls called Bob. The “hand-built by Roberts” sketch was poking fun at an advertising campaign being run at the time by the Italian car manufacturer Fiat, which was promoting its ground-breaking automated assembly line in Turin. Today nearly every automobile in the world is created by robots – an illustration of how completely industry has adapted to the digital world. Digitisation has developed from being a technology delivering marginal benefits to one which is enabling fundamental change and innovation. Today digitisation is at the heart of almost every business sector. The simple definition of digitisation is the process of converting information into a computer-readable format, allowing for better data organisation. Digital advances now mean that every process can be streamlined and made more efficient, cutting billions off the cost of manufacturing, and speeding up procedures. This is being illustrated in areas like data collection, smart energy use, improved flexibility, performance management, improved customer experience, data-driven demand prediction, control of statistics, quality management, and real-time supply chain optimisation. All this is allowing businesses to connect more effectively with customers. Minimum order size is no longer a barrier to trade. Companies like Amazon, for instance, use digitisation to structure its operation, reaching customers it couldn’t hope to communicate with by conventional means. It has been so successful, many other businesses are rapidly adopting and adapting Amazon’s ideas to structure their own establishments. Healthcare industry experts, meanwhile, are predicting that the introduction of digital healthcare services is about to revolutionise the sector, and will be the biggest single factor in the transformation of health provision to ordinary people across the world.