Digital transformation vital to survival of enterprises…

With the consumer-driven operation model gaining momentum, how to accelerate digital transformation to create new product values, optimize production process and efficiency, and achieve effective marketing effects has become crucial to securing the survival of enterprises, Liu Chun-ting, executive vice president of the Taiwan government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), told Digitimes in a recent interview.

Liu said that judging from the microeconomic and technology developments, the paragon business operation model has gradually evolved from the factor-driven, efficiency-driven to the innovation-driven stage that requires increasingly close combination of innovation and commercialization. Now it is reaching the consumer-driven stage that centers on digital services integrating cross-field domain knowledge and intelligent systems.

The consumer-driven business model is greatly associated with big data and artificial intelligence (AI) applications, Liu said, stressing that data competence, or the ability of converting data into valuable services to others, counts most in the digital transformation process, and the concrete data-converted values should be materialized in system architecture and interface solutions for application to the whole production process. He added that the entire smart system should become a data-driven value system to achieve software-defined tech innovation through the integration of domain field knowledge, system architecture and cross-field innovations.

Data digitalization

Liu continued to emphasize that digital transformation does concern the survival of enterprises, saying that a crucial task in this aspect is how to digitalize their data as useful reference for their operations, regardless of the size of the enterprises or the sectors they are in. He noted that many large international enterprises, including DuPont, Wal-Mart, Pfizer, Siemens, Audi, and Fujitsu, are aggressively proceeding with data digitalization.

According to Liu, ITRI has cooperated with companies in more than 10 industrial sectors such as fasteners, screws, ophthalmic services, medical equipment, hospital and water resources to jointly develop products or help them upgrade or transform their operations.

Citing the National Aerospace Fasteners as an example, Liu said that ITRI first utilized 3D optical technology to replace human examination, allowing the company to complete the examination of all its products in 10 seconds, sharply down from 10 minutes for only 4% of sample examination, thus drastically boosting product quality.

Then, ITRI moved to help the company integrate the data of various machines into a manufacturing database, enabling the company to locate product defects seen in different workstations and quickly improve production process to address the defects. The company is now utilizing the manufacturing database to provide further services to its customers, mainly engine makers, by using the data as key reference for designing aerospace parts and components for customers and even for predicting the service life of their engines, thus upgrading their business model from product manufacturing and sales to service partners for customers.

SaaS solutions

Lliu said that Taiwan boasts strong ICT hardware manufacturing prowess, focusing on IaaS (infrastructure as a service) solutions. But IaaS involves fierce competition and limited profits, and therefore the establishment of solution ready platforms (SRP) to offer PaaS (platform as a service) solutions for agile application by various industries has become very important. Nevertheless, enterprises should focus more on developing SaaS (software as a service) platforms for rendering domain specific cloud services to various application fields such as smart cities, Industry 4.0 smart manufacturing, and industrial IoT (Internet of Things), according to Liu.

Liu also disclosed that ITRI will not terminate its cooperation with Qualcomm over the development of 5G small cells, though the cooperation has been temporarily suspended following the decision made by Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission to impose a NT$23.4 billion (US$776 million) on Qualcomm for allegedly violating antitrust rules in the country over the last seven years.

ITRI executive VP Liu Chun-ting.
Photo: Shihmin Fu, Digitimes, November 2017

Categories: ICT manufacturing IT + CE IT components, peripherals Server, IPC, cloud computing, IoT Software, big data

Tags: 5G artificial intelligence Big Data Cloud IaaS Interview IoT ITRI PaaS SaaS

Topics: Trends in industrial computing

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