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Dear prostep ivip members,
The economic crisis caused by COVID-19 plunged many industries into
a financial crisis, affecting their companies’ investment
capabilities while often threatening their very existence. At the
same time companies have to increase efficiency to hold their ground
in fiercer global competition after the crisis. This is a difficult
balancing act that only those capable of remaining flexible and
responding with agility to changing economic conditions will be able
to master. The only companies to survive will be - feely adapted
from Darwin - those that are digitally the fittest. It is not a
coincidence that the digital champions have weathered the crisis
best so far.
Digital technology helped us during the lockdown
to maintain our work environment, to communicate with one another,
and to remain in contact with our customers. It will also be key to
regaining our operational efficiency as soon as possible after the
crisis - or more correctly even during the crisis. And that applies
not only to cooperation and communication, but fundamentally to all
business processes in product development, production technology and
services. We also need to better interlink our global value chains
digitally, enabling us to respond to crisis symptoms at an earlier
stage.
I don’t want to overstress the Chinese script in this
context, which uses for the word crisis two syllables that
individually mean danger and chance. You might have heard this
dozens of times. Still, I actually believe that we must treat the
COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to promote digital transformation
and better integrate our processes. This is particularly true as
changes can be enforced with less risk and lower learning costs in
times of slowed economic activity. The willingness to change is
there. Many of us have experienced during the lockdown that we would
not have been able to work without digital technology.
Hence
my appeal to you: use this crisis as an opportunity to intensify the
digitization of your business processes and maybe even to develop
new ideas for digital business models. This does not necessarily
require large investments: just continue to pursue consistently the
many digitization initiatives already in progress at your company.
The prostep ivip association will provide active support, so that we
all can emerge from this crisis digitally stronger. In the board of
management we invest particular effort to ensure that the annual
symposium can be held - in whatever form - in 2020 as well, because
the exchange of information on obstacles and progress in
digitization has never been more important.
Nobody knows
exactly how long the crisis will maintain its grip on us or how
quickly the economy will recover – but it will. People will fly
again and they will also buy cars again, maybe even more than
before. And we will continue to focus on digitization, because
nothing is more constant than the digital
transformation.
Yours sincerely,
Henrik Weimer | |
