Chapter 4: Business Drivers for Industrial Digital Transformation

In the previous chapter, we learned what kind of digital technologies are needed to help drive transformation and why they're needed, alongside the cultural and business-level changes required. We looked at several emerging technologies that are being used to solve problems that were previously harder to solve. We described some concepts, such as digital twins and digital threads, which have become more feasible due to the easy availability of emerging technologies and are often harmonized through digital platforms. Finally, we looked at some examples of these in use in business and consumer settings.

This chapter will go into the importance of the business process and business model changes to accelerate industrial digital transformation. We will see that often, business process optimization can drive productivity and cost savings, which allows the organization to experiment with business model innovations...