Hindsight is 2020. Yeah right! – is a statement I came up with when the Covid pandemic hit us.

PROLOGUE

For more than the last two decades digital has transforming business from brick-and-mortar to on-line and also bringing about disruptive and new blue-sky opportunities. We are now realizing that digital cannot solve all our problems. The COVID pandemic has suddenly made the physical world much more important.

As we pivot to the new norm, we need to get our physical world in order so that we can take advantage of the new opportunities that digital has created. The physical world was important because it acted as the foundation of the digital world. The physical world is where we live, work, and play – where we get our food, water, and air – where we find our friends and family, and where we learn new skills. It is the infrastructure that supports the digital world. The digital world would not exist without the physical world.

With the advent of the Metaverse, the physical world may be largely ignored by the digital world. The digital world is where all the action will be. The physical world was just a place where we had to store all our stuff and where we had to go to the bathroom.

We beg to differ! The physical world is where the action is. We need to get our physical world in order so that we can take advantage of the new opportunities that digital has created.

In this the 20th article in our series, we talk about hyper automation based on the make, manage, move, market, and maintain vision of Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO) where physical and digital team up to create new vistas of “touchable” interfaces to metamorphose the Everything Connected future we are envisioning.

OVERVIEW

Our 5Ms – Make, Manage, Move, Market and Maintain will be the basis for enabling hyper automation for our connected systems and technologies. It will utilize our four tenets of a design philosophy for innovation, blueprint for smart manufacturing and to enable IoT, a robust integration protocol, and actionable intelligence to pivot to Industry and Services 5.0. It will also facilitate the seamless composition for commercialization – for marketing, selling, supporting, and servicing our solutions. It will use our reference architecture called Digital Twine to coordinate adaptive engineering using digital threads and digital twins.

ENABLING CHANGE

Quoting Heraclitus, James Chambers the former Chairman and CEO of Cisco said: “The only constant is change,” in putting forward the future plans for the company “the Internet will change the way we work, live, learn, and play.”

But change is hard. In The Phoenix Encounter Method, the authors postulate that all businesses sooner or later face the need to reconstruct their future. Businesses must innovate, or they will die. They will need to destroy part or all of the incumbent business models in order to build their breakthrough, future ready organization. “To be born again, first you must die!”

In the Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie asks “How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings? Can men fly?”

Steve Jobs narrating the Think Different commercial, 1997 “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

The Santa Fe Institute describes novelty in biological, social, and technological systems as the feature that provides the variety on which evolutionary processes act. But how does newness— both advantageous and unsuccessful — arise in the first place, and how does it define the surprisingly common evolutionary processes in these seemingly disparate realms?

Here are some relevant quotes:

• In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo states that progress is the mode for mankind. Progress is building on the happened, we need the wisdom of the past to create a better tomorrow.
• Isaac Newton postulated that the reason why we can see far today is because we stand on the shoulder of giants.
• Don Henley of the Eagles in his interview by Billy Joel reiterated on the same about music by saying “We are all standing on the shoulders of somebody, and we need to know who those people are.”
• To paraphrase Meat Loaf’s song “Objects in the rear-view mirror may appear closer that they are.”
• But as Bob Iger rightly points out “You can’t allow tradition to get in the way of innovation. There’s a need to respect the past, but it’s a mistake to revere your past.”

WHAT IS DIGITAL?

Digital is a judicious mélange of Art and Technology, and the right blend is needed from both fields to define, design, build, govern and implement the metamorphosis that enterprises undergo in their progression. It is the visualization, interpretation, and manipulation of digital information. Digital Transformation is not just about technology – it is the coordinated aggregation of people, process and platform interacting to provide a cohesive whole, wherein strategy, planning, governance, change management, agile delivery and operations needed to be synchronized.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

In prior articles, we showcased the ways in which digital technologies are used to create new forms of communication and expression, and to create new ways of understanding the world. Imagined and done right, digital transformation had a metamorphic effect across almost all departments from business intelligence, recruitment, sales, and marketing, to engineering and specifically software development.

Digitization vs Digitalization

Gartner defines digitalization as “the use of digital technologies to transform a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business.” Similar to Wikipedia, Gartner also says, “Digitization is the process of changing from analog to digital form.” Digitalization moves beyond digitization, leveraging digital information technology to entirely transform a business’ processes — evaluating, re-engineering, and reimagining the way you do business. If digitization is a conversion of data and processes, digitalization is a transformation. More than just making existing data digital, digitalization embraces the ability of digital technology to collect data, establish trends and make better business decisions.

Digitization is about elevating the business by providing for on-line interactions, whereas digitalization is a disruption – a metamorphosis of the business to take advantage of adjacencies and value streams that were hitherto un-envisioned. Successful Digital Transformation depends on the ability to correctly identify, capture, and synthesize all the relevant data signals (internal and external) in meaningful ways to shift your vision from hindsight to foresight.

OUR PHILOSOPHY

We contend that Hyper Automation is the next step after Digital Transformation merging the physical and digital worlds in a seamless balance to effect change and bring about new ways of doing. Convergence of technology, the physical and digital realms and behavior is only accelerating and the butterfly effect it causes is transformative and disruptive.

In the current business world, there are two types of automation: deterministic and probabilistic. Deterministic automation is when a process is followed exactly the same way every time. For example, a machine that stamps out the same product at the same speed, with the same force, and using the same amount of ink every time. Probabilistic automation, on the other hand, is when a process is not followed the same way every time.

Hyper Automation is the combination of deterministic and probabilistic automation. It will enable:

• new concepts in Additive Manufacturing to include simulation, 3D prototyping and printing and metrological qualification,
• Agile Methodologies to iterate on possible models to quickly hone-in on the optimal solution, and
• Utilize Digital Treads, Digital Twins and Emergent technologies

not only to prevent supply chain bottlenecks, but also create products and solutions that meet unique needs of the customer. It will be able to learn from past results and make corrections as needed especially in cases like maintenance and support. As a result, businesses can automate more processes and achieve consistent results.

We have designed a Digital Twine^TM to help supercharge the Digital Transformation journey into Hyper Automation, with Data & Intelligence at the core. There are 4 elements to the Digital Feedback loop:

1. Transforming Products through connected and sustainable product innovation and digital services
2. Engaging Customers and Partners throughout a product’s lifecycle in new ways to deliver better customer experiences
3. Empowering Employees with the skills and tools to be more effective and efficient
4. Optimizing Operations through agile, flexible, and responsive production processes to innovate at the speed customer’s demand

What we are building is the technology that connects these elements together in a way that allows businesses to completely change the way they operate and innovate to meet and exceed customer expectations.

HYPER AUTOMATION

We contend that Hyper Automation will be comprised of three parts:

1. Digital Enablement either via brownfield digitization implementations of retrofitting existing machines with smart sensors and IoT capabilities, or via greenfield digitalization implementations to completely revamp the shop floor with new RPA based machines and tools. This will be based on our design philosophy for innovation and our reference architecture for automation and process management. We will also implement dynamic process controls utilizing augmented reality technology – AR/VR/XR to enable digital twinning, scanning and other metrological techniques to qualify products for signoff.
2. IoT based connectivity comprising of smart sensors, edge servers, API gateways and cloud provisioning to effect monitoring, managing, storing, analyzing, predicting, and inferring on accumulated data to determine forecasting and future course of action. Herewith we will utilize our integration protocol Tendril Connector to coordinate the interactions and mappings.
3. Robust AI/ML based technology, some of which we will be pioneering based on what we call actionable intelligence to correctly determine action based on cause-effect relationships and their consequences. We will also add other Emergent Technologies here based on our Computational Cybernetic framework to understand the knowns and the unknowns so that complex models can be correctly analyzed. Our Tau Codex Orchestrator will enable the proper composition of multi-modal perception engines based on different modalities of intelligence.

In a subsequent article titled “Engaging Disengagement“, we will review automation within our development process and for our connected products, thus re-affirming our Outside-Inside theme. This will talk about rules and regulations and what we plan to do to take control of processes when needed to intervene so that things do not get out of hand.

SUMMARY

Markets are shifting to such extent that they open the door to innovation with new products, services, and ways of doing business becoming the norm as a result. All of this is (and has been) playing out at the expense or demise of those who continue down a path of business as usual. The need to change is no longer something for everyone else, it is the first step toward one of the most important movements in business evolution today…hyper automation.

Hyper Automation is the key to unlocking the potential of the fifth industrial revolution and the future of work. Custom manufactory will be the future of manufacturing as the ability to mass customize and personalize products and services will be key to catering towards human-centric customer enablement.

Software is like magic, someone said because you can have it do anything! But we believe that the true achievement is in building tangible products thru a themed articulation – to design, make and support the new – where the digital and physical merge in a synthetic mélange to make the impossible.

Thus, in subsequent posts, we will pivot to concentrate on the materialization of products and services, the real hard-tech problem that will constitute the physicality of our being as a company. We will also articulate our themed roadmaps and our MVP based strategy for execution.

In a series of subsequent articles on this, we will tackle the hard problem of engineering in the new based on gear up, ascension and genesis. Here we will be utilizing adaptive engineering, additive manufacturing, electronic componentry, and coordinated maintenance and service to define smart manufacturing and our connected products in the micro, macro, and hyper mobility space.

NITIN UCHIL Founder, CEO & Technical Evangelist

nitin.uchil@numorpho.com