Digitalisation creates savings for Australian businesses: report

Schneider Electric has released its 2019 Transformation Benefits Report, which uncovers the financial value of digital transformation for Australian businesses.

The Digital Transformation Benefits Report is said to offer up concrete evidence of the power of digitisation across the spectrum of global commerce. This evidence takes the form of 330 data points developed from a sample repository of 230 customer projects Schneider Electric completed in the last five years across 41 countries. In addition, the report features stories from 34 customers, providing overviews of the goals they started with, the challenges they faced, the solutions they chose and the results they saw.

At the core of this report are 12 key business benefits of digital transformation. These benefits are divided into three categories, each essential to effective marketplace competition: capital expenditure (CapEx), operational expenditure (OpEx), and sustainability, speed and performance. The report focuses on four key tenets of the Australian economy — buildings, data centres, industry and infrastructure — all undergoing transformations that will fundamentally change the way people will live, work and play.

The report demonstrates the power of digital transformation in energy management and automation: when businesses digitise both energy management and automation, the two work in concert to drive greater value.

“Digital transformation is the only way of delivering consistency and efficiency across a company,” said Gareth O’Reilly, Country President at Schneider Electric. “Technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence and big data analytics are making companies more efficient and innovative, boosting their competitive advantage.”

The evidence presented by the report puts to rest concerns in the market that digital transformation is an expensive CapEx proposition involving new systems and difficult integration into existing processes. The customer projects studied in the report demonstrate the opposite.

The study shows that digitisation of engineering processes, for instance, can save businesses and organisations an average of 35% in CapEx costs and time optimisation. Further, commissioning costs of new systems and assets can be reduced by an average of 29%.

The study also reveals that digitisation, by harnessing the IoT, can result in significant savings in OpEx — leading to step change improvements in efficiency, reliability, safety and sustainability. Businesses and organisations report average savings of 24% in energy consumption, as a result of digitisation.

“In industrial applications, digital transformation allows businesses to do more with less — more yield with less energy, fewer materials and fewer labour hours,” said Neil Smith, VP of Industry at Schneider Electric. “Increased productivity, up to 50%, results from energy management and automation efficiencies across the value chain, from IoT-enabled tracking to automated production lines.”

The full report can be found here.

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