DECEMBER 20238MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY INSIGHTSIN MY OPINIONA MULTIFACETED APPROACH TO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONTHE TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY OF OSHKOSH CORPORATION IN THE MANUFACTURING TECH SPACEA few years ago, Oshkosh Corporation, a global industrial manufacturing company with facilities in Europe, Mexico, Brazil, and China, embarked on the digital transformation pathway. The company has four different business segments comprising defense, fire and emergency, access, and the commercial division that manufactures refuse collection vehicles. As the senior vice president and CIO, my role in spearheading the transformation journey involves every aspect of information and digital technology. On one side, it includes running a global infrastructure, cybersecurity, and application landscape, while on the other side, the focus is on leading our digital manufacturing, advanced analytics, data, automation, and RPA initiatives.Our global team handles the entire scope of infrastructure application, cybersecurity, automation, digital manufacturing, and analytics. The focus of our digital transformation journey is on incorporating technologies in three distinct areas of manufacturing--efficiency, quality, and safety of our employees and the workforce. Both from an organizational and leadership perspective, our goal is to profoundly impact the efficiency and speed of product manufacturing and enhance the customer experience. To fuel growth, we are leaving no stone unturned in leveraging technologies. While we are incorporating software into our products, on the process side, we are in the transformation phase of modernizing our foundational layer by migrating to the cloud and initiating voice transformation, network transformation, desktop transformation, and intelligence service desk using a chatbot and AI. The next transformation phase will include source planning software upgrades on the application and process side. This includes injecting technology to make our supply chain more intelligent and, simultaneously upgrading technologies and adopting new technologies like configuring price quotes for our customer interface points like e-commerce to ease customer interaction.In advanced analytics, the transformation is geared toward unleashing the data value and improving decision-making on sales, aftermarket, and supply chains. We are developing predictive and prescriptive models to optimize and enhance our decision-making and improve the top and bottom lines. As a people-first company, we automate jobs that are repetitive through robotic process automation technologies to ensure our employees get fulfilling job experiences by focusing on higher-value work. We also have our initiative called Run IT as a business that adopts the businesses' best business practices in IT for the demand process, service delivery, pricing, and so on. My advice to my team and other professionals is to emphasize being both value and customer-centric and not technology-centric, whether external or internal customers. MAJOR PAIN POINTS CURRENTLY EXISTING IN THE MANUFACTURING TECH SPACEAs we began digital manufacturing much before the COVID-19 pandemic, our strategic focus is to inject novel technologies and data to improve our efficiencies and quality in the By Anupam Khare, Senior Vice President and CIO, Oshkosh CorporationAnupam Khare
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