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‍This won’t come as a surprise but smart use of technology is an integral part of success in business. We live in the digital era, words like cloud computing, mobile devices, cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, data analysis are all key aspects of our future.
How technology can help make great businesses might not be recognized yet. This article will try and develop why large industries rely on technology and how they implement it to make their businesses and teams wealthier.
When talking about large industries we talk about the largest industries in terms of dollars involved. These include the financial sector, construction, real estate, E-commerce, health, information technology, food industry, oil and gas, automotive manufacturing, and telecommunications. All of them are industries valued above $1 trillion.
These industries are a mix of old industries that don’t seem to leverage new technology like construction and of newer industries like information technology which rely heavily on technology. In any case, even if not directly visible, all of these fields leverage technology, if not they would become irrelevant and fall a lot in value.
Most of the technology is in these fields is not visible to you, the customer, it’s the administrative stuff, the optimization that happens in the shadow that relies on technology. This allows for a variety of new features in prediction and management. Construction for example has benefited greatly from simulation software that enables architects to design buildings and test their resistance in simulation environments. To you, the customer, however, construction still uses reinforced concrete and workers to build the foundations, the walls, and the roof.
Technology’s promise is to further develop an existing feature or implement a new one. The benefits are numerous but we’ll stick to the main goals of implementing technology.
As industries increase in size, there is more demand and less time to spend on each request. Efficiency naturally comes as the main parameter to optimize, technological innovations in this area allow you to help more clients in less time.
The food industry for example largely benefits from new technology by having higher yields, their technology allows them to optimize their land and make the best out of what they have.
This next branch is all about figuring out what will happen. This allows industries to prepare in advance, saving them time and money. Therefore, once again increasing their efficiency.
The production sector makes great use of such technology by implementing predictive failure systems in their conveyor systems. This allows them to repair their systems before they break, which causes less chaos and prevents them from shutting down the entire production line to make up for what happened during the break of one component of the system.
As most of the technology that comes out is autonomous and can work long hours, the technology is far more reliable than a machine, particularly so in extremely repetitive tasks.
Manufacturing tasks benefit largely from technology by allowing businesses to work overnight, and keeping the same productivity across all these hours.
As industries grow larger, there are more factors to keep track of, things have to be maintained and others improved. Keeping track of everything can prove very complicated.
Technology provides an easier way to handle all the information at once, through automatization and AI algorithms that make sense of the data and can warn you when the time is right. The financial sector makes great use of such algorithms to analyze their data and make sense of the numbers they manage.
A few technologies are responsible for most of the technological innovation of larger industries.
In these large industries, everything is recorded, and numbers are analysed to understand consumer behavior. Big data also helps businesses to manage their resources better and allows organizations to offer suggestions to their clients based on the ongoing trends and the needs of their customers.
Drones now appear a lot more in industrial contexts and have started moving away from being recreational toys. The online shopping giant Amazon is working on drone delivery systems. In some remote parts of Africa, drones are used to deliver medical supplies. Large warehouses are now being monitored by drones. Farmers also use them to detect pests, diseased crops and find out which plots need what.
Image recognition has improved vastly, it’s now used for facial recognition, surveillance, video analysis, self-driving vehicles, and augmented reality. The fashion industry leverages this technology to offer clients articles that look like what they wear or that would fit their style.
Another application of image recognition is in the health department where the visually impaired can use the camera on their smartphone to point at an object and get a description of it. This allows them to “see” what’s in front of them.
Virtual reality has become much more than an entertainment device. Companies now use it for simulation. The real estate industry uses it to offer house tours to future homeowners, this gives them the opportunity to visualize exactly what the architect is building or what their next home will be like.
The fashion industry also makes use of virtual reality to provide its clients with real-time projections of their outfits. The sports giant Nike has for example invested in a technology that lets you visualize the shoe you’re customizing by projecting your design in real-time on a white shoe.
Technology is proving itself to be indispensable by making businesses more efficient and reliable. Most innovation in the last years comes from a few breakthrough technologies but the ideas behind their use remain unchanged. All businesses desire increased productivity, it’s all accessible with the right technology in hand.
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