IT-sphere: the main trends in 2021
Dmitry Bulenkov, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, told RBC Pro about what tools will become the main trends in 2021, and what businesses can expect from the new wave of digitalization.
Over the past 10-15 years, companies around the world have paid a lot of attention to improving the efficiency of individual areas of activity or production, but they have not had the opportunity to analyze their interaction with each other.
In 2021, the direction of creating digital duplicates of business processes will be actively developed. With the help of such twins, companies will be able to analyze end-to-end processes, that is, the totality of processes that lead to the achievement of a specific business goal.
In fact, they are similar to the already familiar digital counterparts of equipment or production sites — and also allow you to understand what these or other changes will lead to before they are implemented in practice.
For example, in retail, digital twins are needed to manage the supply chain from the formation of a need for a product to its appearance at the point of sale
(including procurement, logistics, communication with the supplier, and much more).
You can improve the efficiency of each process individually, but the performance metrics of individual elements will conflict with each other. Providing a lower purchase price will increase the purchase time (and complicate planning) or the purchase volume (and increase inventory balances). If the company builds a digital twin of the entire supply chain, it will get a combined economic effect of 70-150% greater than when reengineering each of the processes separately.
Users of the digital twin of the business process are not only employees responsible for efficiency, but also heads of functions and departments, financial and commercial directors. They use the data of the digital twin both to make strategic decisions that transform the company's work, and to choose the best options for action within the framework of operational management.
2020 was the year when the first projects to create such digital counterparts of business processes in large corporations, such as Siemens, Bosch, ABB, Dell Technologies, and the Russian "Severstal", were completed.
The theory of the effectiveness of this technology is confirmed by the real economic effect, so we can talk about a full-fledged trend that will be picked up by many market players in the near future.
Software solutions for optimization
Another trend that was actively developing in 2020 and will continue to attract attention in the next year is the use of software solutions for optimization. The very concept of optimization is quite broad. It encompasses many transformational processes. Optimization is the process of maximizing beneficial characteristics, ratios (for example, optimizing production processes and production), and minimizing costs/losses.
What is meant by this concept in the field of IT?
1. Application of various Solver class software products for internal optimization;
2. Using RPA (robotic process automation - from the English "robotization of processes") - to exclude the human factor;
3. Upgrade current systems to improve efficiency, from simple user interface edits and user interaction design (UI\UX) to more global upgrades. Among the latter, we can highlight the use of machine learning technologies in auto-orders and forecasts, or open-source databases that can store everything in RAM to increase the speed of work.
Read the full version of the article on the RBC Pro portal: IT sphere: the main trends in 2021: RBC Pro (rbc.ru)
ИТ-сфера: главные тренды в 2021 году :: РБК Pro (rbc.ru)