Lee Sam-soo, Chief Digital Officer at LG Electronics
To bring innovation to every point withal the value chain, and ultimately provide maximum and differentiated value to customers, LG is urgently engaging in an organization-wide digital transformation (DX). To slide the transformation process related to consumer experience, LG established the new Chief Digital Office (CDO) semester last year. An innovator by nature, LG is waffly the way it works, utilizing data and technologies, including AI, to increase efficiency and reduce financing from manufacturing and quality, to purchasing, supply uniting management (SCM) and consumer support (CS). By encouraging and implementing innovation at every level, LG will not only unzip the whilom goals, but moreover be largest worldly-wise to identify and upgrade all aspects of the consumer wits (CX).
To fully understand the needs and wants of customers, LG created AI- and data-based solutions that are helping the visitor refine the CX right from the very outset, from product and service planning to the minutiae stage. When LG launches a product or service, the New eXperience Introduction (NXI)* process is unromantic to monitor whether the CX is stuff delivered as intended. This internal process is an innovation that will profoundly modernize the value of diverse offerings and trademark moving forward.
Based on the company’s wits implementing these programs and systems so far, LG has some recommendations for raising innovative DX solutions to create largest ways of working and CX outcomes.
For companies with legacy to successfully promote DX to internal audiences, identifying key merchantry challenges that can be solved using technology – largest known as ‘low-hanging fruit’ – must be a top priority. These low-hanging fruit unchangingly exist within any company. So, rather than jumping into projects that seek to transpiration everything or run for multiple years stook ever-greater amounts of data, LG identified and focused its energies on points that can be solved now using current AI and data capabilities.
Once identified, it can be divided into two categories: ‘DX for the Company’ and ‘DX for the Customer.’ The former relates to innovation in how an organization works, while the latter refers to innovation in the overall CX space. Introducing any form of ‘DX for the Company’ can be a challenging undertaking, expressly where older organizations are concerned. This is considering any visitor with a long history is increasingly likely to have its value uniting stock-still in the same way it unchangingly has been. However, if a company’s methods of working wideness all areas of the value uniting – including development, manufacturing, purchasing, quality and SCM – have remained static for a long time, or there has only been gradual improvements made over time, there is a strong possibility that the using of digital technologies, such as data wringer and AI, will produce meaningful results.
LG is undertaking various company- and customer-targeted DX initiatives and is once seeing spanking-new results in both spheres. Recently, LG Smart Park in Changwon, South Korea was selected as a Lighthouse Factory by the World Economic Forum (WEF). The WEF confers this designation on facilities that are implementing Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and AI, to usher in the future of manufacturing today.
LG’s “Digital Twin” technology is one of the key factors in LG Smart Park stuff named a Lighthouse Factory. It collects and analyzes data from the factory and its many production lines every 30 seconds, enabling it to virtuously predict if any issues will occur up to 10 minutes in whop and restock any parts or materials surpassing they run out. Each turnout line at LG Smart Park is tying to an ‘intelligent warehouse,’ which monitors inventory in real time and automatically requests the re-supply of items needed to alimony production running smoothly. Flipside 4IR innovation that sets LG’s facility untied is the use of 5G network-connected logistics robots that rove the factory floor, taking the most optimal path to transport parts and materials wherever they’re needed. Also, the visitor has managed to minimize product defect rates and stave lengthy downtimes by leveraging big data wringer and AI prediction.
LG Smart factory is a success story of DX, its intelligent innovations resulting in a 20 percent uplift in productivity, increased worker efficiency and a significantly lower product defect rate. Its impressive performance could well trigger the integration of remoter DX systems and technologies throughout the unshortened company, including in areas such as material procurement, product transportation planning, SCM, purchasing and sales. Verifiable success is, without all, the weightier way to promote any kind of transpiration within an organization.
The using of DX to purchasing processes is expressly meaningful due to the supply uniting issues caused by COVID-19 and other globally impactful events. LG is currently developing an intelligent system to predict the price and supply volatility of components and essential raw materials. This will be an invaluable resource during pre-negotiations with suppliers, enabling the visitor to focus on data-based objectives rather than stuff guided by the intuition of individual managers. Market monitoring, prediction and scenario-response management all wilt much easier and less dependent on the capabilities of personnel when you add advanced, digital technologies into the equation.
There are many possibilities for and examples of enhanced performance via ‘DX for the Company,’ expressly given that the inherent value of DX is not restricted to any particular industry.
Active exploration in the scene of ‘DX for the Company’ is highly recommended considering there is once a variety of value villenage and data that can be utilized to discover so-called low-hanging fruit. Furthermore, DX has been shown to directly modernize key measures of corporate performance, including, but not limited to, productivity and profitability. Whether speaking in financial or qualitative terms, the positive effects that DX can have are relatively easy to communicate to internal stakeholders, which is helpful for increasing buy-in and reducing resistance. In areas such as manufacturing, purchasing and quality, where there once exists an expectation that resurgence activities will be regularly introduced, the task of promoting DX becomes, in most cases, plane easier.
Lastly, it needs to be emphasized that, vastitude the improved performance of an individual organization, the true success of ‘DX for the Company’ will come when these new methods and systems of working have spread to workplaces and corporations all over the globe.
Of course, transpiration management is a key part of ensuring a smooth DX. LG have unexplored the ‘10X’ (or ten-times) method to ensure a resulting process of reorganizing its working methods and systems until the requisite changes have unmistakably and verifiably been made. It’s well-nigh expanding the company’s efforts by 10X (or more) in a way that makes sense, with each transpiration towers upon the last with an express purpose and goal in mind – not merely transpiration for the sake of it, but to streamline processes and add value in as many ways as possible. Scalability is flipside part of it, as companies want to be worldly-wise to develop flexible platforms that can grow with its needs and ‘bend’ in vibrations with shifts in the market and consumer demand. With constructive transpiration management and the resulting implementation and proliferation of targeted actions, companies can realize the envisioned DX in its totality.
LG believes that an unifying of successes wideness the various areas of ‘DX for the Company’ will act as a strong foundation for a successful ‘DX for the Customer.’ By using DX to bring well-nigh innovation in the way we work, LG can profoundly expand the telescopic and value of the CX and, in doing so, unhook plane increasingly innovative experiences to its diverse customers worldwide, helping to bring well-nigh a largest life for all.
This story was edited from an editorial full-length vendible published in The Electronic Times. Stay tuned for Part 2, titled “DX for the Customer: Innovating the Consumer Wits with Data”.
By Lee Sam-soo, CDO at LG Electronics
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* In 2022, LG replaced its previous product-oriented minutiae process, known as ‘New Product Introduction’ (NPI), with ‘New eXperience Introduction’ (NXI), a increasingly consumer experience-oriented process.