“They could not imagine it, so they did not expect it”

During an implementation scheduling meeting with a new customer I heard a comment from one of the engineers to his colleague “You know, according to me it’s not the big changes which are concerning, it’s the small ones that make me nervous.”

I can very well understand this remark. I am Head of Projects at WRENCH, an IT solutions company specialising in digital transformation of E&C organisations. My role is to implement our technology and make it comfortable for the new users. As such, the change at corporate level is not something I have to think about but I do have to be concerned about the impact on an engineer’s daily schedule. In his shoes I might feel concerned about how the change would affect interactions with my staff or my productivity and deliverables. Such concerns without doubt could create a sense of pressure. Under such circumstances, a bit of hesitation is natural. It is logical to say that every employee, at every level will have his or her own type of concern on this, and together this could make a global resistance to change.

So, speaking as an engineer, when it is something that makes my working schedule transparent,(which is what happens by implementing a WRENCH smart solution), that could be worrying at first. Even the most diligent person will have an ‘off’ day sometimes. But, when I hear such concerns from our customer, even though I can understand the reasons for this I would like to say – there’s really nothing to worry about my friend! Relax!

In my 6 years at WRENCH, the client teams showed caution towards me and my team at first until, they saw with their own experience how their work was simplified and optimized. The acceptance comes but takes time.

We all know that Engineering Organisations and Engineers are creatures of habit, so to say, and not that comfortable with change. This discomfort factor is lessened when the person understands the enormous benefits. Because, Digital Transformation is about optimizing and making things better and faster…. not just for management but for everybody! Who wouldn’t want that?

For this reason, awareness is the key. We must educate customers about the ‘why’ – why should they go in for a transformation of this nature.

Let’s see how do engineering teams stand to benefit from digital transformation.

– Fast and painless data-sharing. Most companies are aware of EDMS. If the functionality of an EDMS is integrated with the other project processes that are throughout the organisation, then there would be change at a meta-level, and so the benefits also occur at that level. In the smaller picture for individual engineers, the cost and time savings on day-to-day work is cumulative, and increases over time. Take any task an engineer performs daily. Whatever the time he is currently spending on it, a digital solution would cut short it by 80-90%. That’s a huge benefit!

– Achievable quality. As engineers, we understand the value of a good QMS but following it and enforcing it is another matter. Quality every time, on time is possible only with technology, without it the QMS is just on-paper. But does the Industry prefer to keep the manual ways? All the clients I worked with were shocked to see how much their quality improved after they implemented our digital solutions. They could not imagine it, so they did not expect it.

– Easy and painless communication and collaboration has made society to communicate freely regardless of location. Building digital communication into the project control system itself, at the root level, lets you record every project interaction and transaction, so that communication can be free of conflict and misunderstanding and tense situations are avoidable. This makes for stress-free working.

– Managers will get true Time and Cost control with the real-time project monitoring capability which leads to predictability of actual events. This helps the team to take corrective action beforehand and avoid delay and overrun. We live in a world of ‘alerts’ and notifications – why not make this part of the E&C work process also.

These are just few reasons I believe that Digital Transformation is necessary for E&C companies.

It should not be forgotten that Transformation begins by transforming one process and one mindset at a time.