Espresso 4.0 by
Wizata
Ok, Noel, we spoke a little bit about what you do and your work, and you mentioned something that resonated with me: consultants have bad reps in the industry. You have experience in consulting roles, so we wanted to know why you think that is and how you remedy that. How do you surpass that challenge?
Exaggerated Claims and a Lack of Trasparency
I had an opportunity to work with consultants and make contracts with them while working for big Pharma. Most typical challenges consultants have are related to two points. The first one is something I call “consulting magic.”
It happens when consultants claim that they will double or triple your business capacity overnight or that no one else can provide and implement solutions as well as they can. Even worse is when the clients, as in our case, have no experience working with outsiders and completely put their trust in this almighty consultant.
Clients are happy initially, but they soon realize that the things consultant “helped” them with had only put them in a bigger mess than when they started.
The second point is consultants' very common phrase: results take time, don’t worry. Clearly, you cannot always show your client results at the very beginning. But too many consultants don’t show any results at all. They keep telling the client not to worry, and when they are done with their work, the client has no idea what happened behind the scenes.
If the client has experience in these situations, they will require some due diligence to ensure tasks have been properly completed. Otherwise, the consultant slips away without doing much or anything.
Those are the two key points of struggle with the consultants and how to address them. As a consultant, you should avoid these situations to ensure you gain the trust of the client you are helping within the organization.
Coaching or Consulting?
That is why I decided to take this one step further. In my business, instead of referring to myself as a consultant, I refer to myself as a coach. Consultants are required to deliver the results, but sometimes they don’t do well with gaining knowledge from implementing their ideas. They don’t need any expertise in the process but to help the project leader or manager to deliver the results and learn from the process.
That will help them engage more with the people and the process while gaining better results that they can sustain for longer periods.
In essence, this bad reputation and mistrust of consultants come from exaggerated claims of success and very little transparency in what they actually do once they onboard a client and start collaborating with the industry.
Role of Industry 4.0
Recently, marketing has experienced quite a difficult time and kind of unprecedented disruptions. Coping with the war in Ukraine, your native land Puerto Rico in recent years also had some natural disasters, to name a few.
What role does Industry 4.0 or digitalization play in such an environment? Is that the direction that industrial should be going? Should they be aiming for some capital investment to digitalize further? And if yes, why?
When you incorporate all this technology into every business element, create sophisticated operations and deliver more value to the customer while improving the company's bottom line, that transformation means you need to explore new territories regarding technology.
That will enhance customer experience if you are in the service business or the attribute of a product you manufacture. Those attributes can be related to price, delivery, and quality. When we talk about the market, this should be a top priority in both segments, commercial operations and manufacturing.
But, it is also significant in other businesses, such as the public sector. Government agencies may have obsolescence in infrastructure or do not have a customer-focused application to support the clients. This also includes healthcare providers who do not use the available technology in my market.
Here is where things get complicated: a mix of should I buy from one side and urgent changes that require smart investments on the other. This is what we call a “burning platform.”
As a leader, you have to be careful not to jump to anything you find in the market to a certain solution without understanding it first. You have to do this transformation, but you need to do it in a structured way. You need to follow the framework to ensure the transformation works, and that is not something that will lose momentum soon after the implementation.
It definitely helps to have an ally in that transformation, in adopting new technology. Someone with experience, coaches within the specific domain, relevant domain to the client.
Government Grants
Your work expands internationally, and you have clients in multiple countries. What do you see as the stance governments take, if any, in terms of incentivizing digital transformation? Do they offer any grants in your experience specifically? And, should industrials consider potential help from the government when creating their digitalization strategy?
As in our case, with some clients and any organization, the government must have a part in it, which is common in every industry. When implementing these digital solutions by creating innovation and providing enough digital resources and funding, the change must occur at the top level for many organizations.
Depending on the organization in the government, the complete organization must change to ensure that the required awareness is there, which will make the transformation successful, obviously, with the strategic approach within the framework.
For example, in Puerto Rico, they have a CIO (chief information officer), as you would find in similar industries. And at that top level, that position and that person must understand all the detailed information and how to clear the path from all the expectations.
This will gain the sponsorship you need and ensure that the movement of your transformation is continuous. Once you have that person there, in some instances governments offer not just a grant, but a tax heaven in order to support local functional activities.
In the case of Puerto Rico, we have a law that states you can perform and offer services outside the island with the same benefits regarding taxes. This allows you to go through the transformation remotely.
Providing the Resources
For that to happen, you need to have the resources in their place. From the person leading transformation, to directors, managers and technicians. And this is the first are to focus on - getting the organization to the right place.
Then, something that many government organizations and companies do is focusing the digital transformation on what we call customer-facing function - a relationship with the client face-to-face.
This gives you a rapid insight into your product or service, because closer you are to the point of failure, the closer you are to the variations that are cause of the problems. When you gain those insights, you can design solutions to other issues that come from complaints or affects your products or the service you provide.
Lastly, some governments provide that support in labor. For example, they will provide experts on data transformation with experience in change management. These highly trained and skilled experts will secure the knowledge transfer to whatever company they are working with.
Furthermore, they are very good at addressing those surprises during the testing implementation. Those are the things that people consider. Experts, the tools, but especially the knowledge. How to make a transfer and how to handle the change that will come with it.
Obviously, it's not enough to just get the new technology. Once you have it, you need to know how to use it properly and you need to move culturally from experience or intuition based business where you're relying on the experience of your engineers and operators, to a data driven business where you're relying on data coming in from your production to make best, quicker, and better decisions.
The Cool Future of Industry 4.0 Tech
Moving away a bit from the heavy subject - What is the coolest thing in terms of Industry 4.0 tech or anything within that field that you've seen most recently that you remember?
I love the nanotechnology, especially ones that improve treatments for patients. I have seen some interesting information and videos on different channels, especially related to medicine and healthcare. It is a very complicated market, and you have to build the trust with the healthcare providers.
I know that this is something we will be very successful in. I know it will be used for many different purposes, but I prefer to focus on the support to the patients journey to health. Yes, nanotechnology sounds like something out of the science fiction book, especially in medicine, but it is an exciting field.
