Individual products go through a lengthy process comprising many steps and involving many departments until they are ready for manufacturing. In this context, it is often difficult to keep all employees up to speed, especially when external personnel are involved as well.

All events have to be canceled due to the pandemic? Not in times of digitalization! Our environmental team was represented at a virtual trade show for the recycling and waste management industry and organized a live webinar. Pia Gegenhuber has summarized her experiences for us in a report. Click here to read her blog post.

Switching to software-as-a-service solutions means adopting a digital culture for the entire organization. This forms the basis for the automation of routine operations as well as the creativity of your staff. The use of artificial intelligence, analytics applications or automation with software robots makes the company more appealing to employees and business partners. It changes the way people collaborate and potentiates know-how within the company.

Analyses show that it doesn't make sense to do a one-to-one comparison of costs for on-premises applications with the pricing for public cloud services. Experts emphasize that you have to also factor in certain advantages that cannot be expressed in numbers. In cost-benefit analysis, SaaS solutions have a significant edge over private cloud and on-premises systems.

Digitalizing business models, evaluating offers, establishing new distribution channels, verifying supply chains and automating production. To implement these goals, executives are working with their specialized departments to move digitalization forward. In so doing, they are utilizing innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and process automation in order to gain immediate business advantages.

In the future, business security will be based on a division of labor. When Management provides the staff with the right environment for innovation and cutting-edge work with the latest technologies, they reduce and control their risks. This is because software-as-a-service ensures that you're always working with the very best and safest tools – so your processes never stop running. Instead of assuming liability for operating their systems and storing and archiving data, Management transfers the risks to their cloud service providers.

As a result of the pandemic, managers at many companies are forced to rethink and reformulate business models and objectives. For the IT department, this means increasing capacity very quickly, implementing innovative technologies and, at the same time, shutting down obsolete systems and processes. If IT managers make use of software as a service, they can quickly and easily switch applications while simultaneously boosting digitalization within their company. If, however, IT managers rely on on-premise systems, they will often find themselves in a technological “trap”.

In many companies, IT managers are working on increasing their knowledge and broadening their basic technical skills in order to fulfill an important requirement set by the management board: The objective is to change and adapt IT systems to make them faster and more innovation-friendly, as is required due to business models and the change in competition. In this context, the IT department has the potential to become the driver of digitalization with the right employees and innovative technologies.

For their attacks, criminal hackers specifically look for weaknesses in IT systems, and they often find them at companies who are eager to manage and protect all systems themselves. For many companies, there is a striking mismatch between technological efforts and the number of employees on the one hand and the know-how, aggressiveness and number of attackers on the other.

Manufacturers need to be sure the documentation in the manufacturing and logistics processes of their products is complete, whether it’s because of legal regulations or for quality assurance reasons.