Interviews

Predictive analytics helps in forecasting economic uncertainties

Over the last 2 years, the pandemic has been the root cause of a tremendous amount of market and economic volatility—much of it beyond the control of individual organizations. From inflation and rising material costs to supply chain disruption, yesterday’s unprecedented times continue to linger in today’s business dynamics. However, it is critical to draw lessons and evolve business strategies to be prepared for uncertainties in the future.  Business leaders all over the world are trying their best to help organizations navigate through these uncertainties by using technology. As new classes of intelligence and algorithms become more advanced and more accessible, business leaders can now “future-proof” their strategic plans and forecasts by shifting away from legacy forecasting models and incorporating predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) into their planning processes.

During the pandemic, we have also learned that uncertainties can never be predicted. However, if organizations use technologies like data and predictive analytics to sift through current and historical data to detect trends and forecast events and conditions , they can optimize costs, find and exploit patterns contained within data to detect risks and opportunities. With predictive analytics, organisations will be able to move beyond reactive operations and shift toward more predictive and proactive activities, which helps increase the chance of success. The goal is to learn from past mistakes and successes to know what to change. Mr. Rajasekaran Panchatcharam, Chief Products Officer, Bahwan CyberTek shares more insights on the same.

 

Kindly explain how digital transformation helps organisations to be ‘future-proof’ and How Bahwan CyberTek’s expertise is utilized to ensure smooth transition?

Digital transformation continues to be a priority for customer-centric CXOs. When an organization embarks on value-oriented transformation, there is an accompanying cultural shift that promotes innovation and problem-solving. This ecosystem prepares the organization to take on uncertainty and changing market needs, and adapt the processes and technologies that cater to the needs of digitally-empowered customers.

Being future-proof is the ability businesses to be able to stay agile and adopt new processes, technologies and culture to stay aligned with market demands, customer expectations and technology trends.

BCT’s focus on digital transformation helped us stay ahead during the digital shift. What helped our clients in the journey was our ability to deliver accelerated digital transformation by combining our Services, Products and Partner Products, that accelerates digital transformation, but also delivers value in the near and long term by streamlining processes and optimizing operations. Our constant focus on innovation has helped deliver an edge for our customers on their transformation journeys.

 

What according to you are some of the challenges faced while deploying digital tools like predictive analytics, Al, and machine learning?

Some of the common challenges in the digital transformation journey include lack of alignment to the business objective, mismatched skills, and inadequate awareness.

Data is one of the most important ingredients of digital transformation. And in any large organization, this data resides across multiple systems, which often operate in silos and are often built with legacy technologies. The biggest challenge then is to ensure that these systems talk to each other, exchange data, enable workflows and automation.

One major challenge is data cleansing when data originates from multiple systems where there are duplicates and single truth could be challenged.  Managing both master data along with key transactional data with singular truth without inconsistencies is a must for digital tools leverage to make the best of decisions originating from them.

Other challenges include integration, poor user experience of older applications leading to low adoption, process efficiency for better collaboration and smoother workflows, cultural shift to think digital and improve customer experiences and finally getting the leadership buy-in and budgets needed for investments in digital technologies.

 

Please share your thoughts on how the pandemic has accelerating the digital transformation journey for organisations across industries. Do you feel this trend will likely continue?

What happened during the pandemic was a quantum digital leap, coupled with a dramatic shift in perceptions. Digital transformation went from being ‘elusive’ to ‘imperative’ almost overnight. Risks were no longer barriers. Uncertainty became the norm. Challenges were embraced and being resilient became the rallying cry within the industry.

This environment enabled rapid adoption, perhaps years’ worth of digital migration in a matter of weeks, seamlessly without any compromise on compliance. Businesses that invested in this opportunity did more than just survive the pandemic. They thrived, and they were able to explore new avenues for value creation. Technology became more than a cost priority, it became a business imperative.

Digital transformation will continue to accelerate despite market fluctuations. First, we had the pandemic. Next was the supply chain challenges. And lastly the geopolitical fluctuations. But technology’s influence on customer and employee experience will ensure that digital will stay the biggest game-changer in the years to come.

 

Which industries have gained maximum traction in terms of adopting to digital tool for business growth?

Thanks to programs like Digital India, the digital transformation journey was already in progress here. With strong support from the government, sectors like BFSI, e-commerce, healthcare, education, and energy were able to leverage technology to get closer to customers even while they were under lockdown. We are also seeing increased demand from the transportation sector, with organizations seeking technology solutions to improve operations and passenger experience.

BCT has signed a contract with the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation Limited (MMRCL), the nodal agency responsible for the implementation of the Mumbai Metro Line-3 (MML-3) project in India. BCT will build the Common Asset Management System (CAMS) for the MML-3 and will provide the end-to-end design, implementation and support for CAMS, leveraging its expertise in delivering enterprise-class EAM solutions. BCT will build an integrated CAMS to optimize processes, perform lifecycle cost monitoring and improve the cost efficiency of MMRCL.

 

Please share some examples or case study to understand how BCT’s products are used across industries?

There were two ways we were able to deliver differentiation for our clients.

  • One, seamless, accelerated outcome-based digital transformation. With almost two decades of digital transformation experience, we were able to turbo charge digital reinvention for our clients. We started by identifying areas of transformative value. Later, equipped with the deep-domain expertise in BFSI, Retail, Energy, and Telecom and vast knowledge on how to avoid common pitfalls, we were able to steer IT, business, and HR teams towards value creation.
  • Two, we were able to add value to existing mature digital customers. Digital had levelled the playing field and businesses were punching above their weight, forcing brands to differentiate. This is where our IP expertise came in. Digital brands were able to augment their capabilities with BCT products like retina 360, dropthought, rt360, and FuelTrans and optimize efficiency. While others were experimenting, we were able to deliver tangible results.

Here are few examples of our products and their use cases:

  • FuelTrans, our IP that provides fuel station automation and downstream logistics solutions for oil marketing companies, helped achieve 25% reduction in fulfilment time, 100% fleet optimization, 6 hours reduction in order-to-load time and 1% improvement in net margins for a privately-held downstream oil company in India.
  • Retina360, our patented predictive analytics product, monitors 180 turbines across wind farms for a global IPP and through an integrated central command center, helps monitor over 400MW of generating capacity in real-time along with predictive analytics on the operations of the turbines. Retina360 also works with a wind energy IPP in India with 24×7 insightful, intuitive analysis through 24×7 monitoring of their 100MW of wind assets in real-time along with advanced performance degradation analytics.
  • Rt360, our IP product for Banks, helps India’s third largest private sector bank identify model deficiencies and improve model documentation quality and model review process. This process assisted the Bank in achieving Basel II IRB and Risk-based Supervision compliance. A large private sector bank in India uses our rt360 Early Warning System to assign risk scores for accounts and identifying the probability of default thereby reducing risk exposures, manage non-performing assets and optimize return on capital.

Customer-centric enterprises need strategic transformation allies to usher in the latest technological advances. Successful collaboration with partners like TIBCO, Oracle, and IBM has reinforced that speed, agility and efficiency can be achieved more quickly when we work with mutually-driven partners.

 

What is the outlook for digital transformation in 2023? Any trends you can highlight?

Enterprises that have a well-defined north star and clarity on the relevance of their transformation, will invest in technology and learning, making the business resilient and helping teams roll with the punches. Their journey from digital ambition to digital execution will be short and impactful, and they will look for opportunities to do more with less. More customer experience, more employee experience, better operational efficiency without having to overhaul the entire system.

From technology standpoint, the future will revolve around automation, analytics and connected ecosystems. Data technologies leveraging AI, ML and predictive analytics will dominate and companies will look to gain production, cost and asset efficiencies through them.

Ubiquitous AI is an emerging trend which is picking up and expected mainstream in the next few years. 5G networks are going to be a reality in India before end of this year and this would open up more IOT applications and devices available along with cloud and virtual reality with a technology convergence paving way for quality data measured at source. This convergence would enable AI/ML to be more realistic and outcome driven in the coming years.

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