I recently had the experience of upgrading my Samsung phone to the S9+. Now for all the iPhone fans out there, this is not your cue to stop reading, this story has relevance to you too.

Upgrading a phone is always a contradictory emotional experience, on the one hand, you are excited to experience all the new features and capabilities, but on the other, you’re also a bit nervous as the transition may not be as seamless as it is supposed to be. Nonetheless, we soldier ahead.

As I noted in Part 1 of this blog, financial workers have always been at the forefront of data collection, structure and management. That doesn’t mean, however, that our careers are impervious to obsolescence. Industry 4.0 is a technological revolution, and this is no time to rest on our pre-transformation laurels. Everyone in the finance ecosystem needs to be on top of incoming technologies, and understand, as best as one can, their long-term implications.

With all the current discussions about Industry 4.0 and the digitalization of industrial value chains, it seems to me that people sometimes forget to mention my own field of endeavour: finance. I suppose that’s not surprising. Finance, alas, may not be the sexiest component of the evolving Industry 4.0 value chain. When the awards are handed out, it’s the men and women implementing automation to the shop floor, introducing AI-backed chat bots into enterprise-wide collaborative networks, or applying predictive analytics for enormous savings in inventory and logistics, who go home with the ribbons, the accolades, the admiration and the Internet articles.

Organizations today operate in a dynamic continuum where the rules of competition and operation are constantly evolving. No industry is immune to the effects of their organizational ecology to properly understand the mechanisms of different manufacturing industries. We cannot just compare the resiliency and responses of segments of the same industry.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has always been key to helping businesses make better-informed business decisions, but thanks to a year of digital advancements, the software’s ability to dramatically impact decision-making has advanced considerably.

I’m doing the rounds of SYSPRO Africa’s offices. It’s Monday 30 June 2031 (my birthday), and SaloME, chatbot and partner of KenDO, our latest chat releases, have everything under control. Having already arranged my trip, they just completed agreed roles and actions I set up with them via SYSPRO GOsist.

Smart factories of the future driven by robots, computers and AI, are no longer the stuff of science fiction. We currently exist in the overlap of Industry 4.0 and the Digital Ecosystem and with it brings technologies and strategies that are fast changing how we conduct business – from day-to-day operations to high-level decision making.

“What a business needs most for its decisions – especially strategic ones, is data about what goes on outside it. Only outside a business are there results, opportunities and threats.”
— Peter Drucker

The pressures of cost, competition and a more demanding consumer continue to drive the digital transformation of industries. It pays to know how best to invest in the right technology for your sector and business type. While benchmarking exercises have long been essential to business success, digitalization requires that companies remain particularly vigilant, lest they find themselves on the wrong side of a digital divide. Positioning an organization in an era of complexity can create differentiated advantages.

The first industrial revolution in the late 18^th century brought with it mechanisation and steam power.  Mass production, assembly lines and electricity followed with the second a century later. Almost another century hence, computers and automation hailed the third. We had witnessed the proliferation of scientific management systems and with it brought the rise of efficiency driven attributes.