In today’s world, relentless competition, pressure on profit margins, the cost of creating and launching new projects, limited room in demand and new markets, and in many cases production cost overruns lead companies to focus all their efforts on driving innovation, achieving new cost-reduction strategies and getting products to market as quickly as possible, and this is where R&D is playing a crucial role.
On the other hand, what consumers want and expect changes quickly, as do quality standards, competition, demand, and technical and legal requirements. With all these variables, companies must keep a large number of criteria up to date. And companies themselves were asking: who owns this responsibility? In recent years, all these variables and changes have been brought together in the research and development (R&D) area.
But what is R&D? The core function of this department is to search for and analyze different services, products, methodologies and activities that can improve the organization’s present and future. Research and development are among the most relevant and essential aspects of a company’s growth and sustainability, so much so that organizations today are confident in the returns of investing in knowledge management; since 2017, companies no longer classify it as an expense or a production cost, but as a valuable investment in sustaining the company’s present and growing its future.
The R&D team is indispensable within the organization and its contribution is extremely valuable because, among other things, it is responsible for giving companies a stable, forward-looking vision, whether by developing new ways of carrying out processes, new technologies, or different variables related to the product, the competition, the market or the consumer. The goal is to reinvent organizations, obtaining greater cross-cutting benefits for the company that directly impact the user.
One of the keys to enabling R&D departments to do good work in the company’s interest is giving them the ability to draw on information: not a piece or a segment, but all of it. Data about customers, competitors, the scientific environment, the market or experts. Information that the organization often already holds from years of experience or of watching the market. However, this is not so simple, because in a sea of data this amount of information can completely overwhelm departments. Once the information is available, there are further challenges in managing and organizing it and, most importantly, in finding and accessing it. To meet this need to access and find information in a timely manner, organizations turned to search and knowledge management solutions based on Artificial Intelligence (hereinafter AI).
Incorporating AI into knowledge management or enterprise search solutions can help the R&D team find and use the information the company already has quickly and accurately: relevant data, not just keyword matches; faster answers to any question; and optimized decision-making, above all with complete data in real time.
Enterprise search tools can incorporate machine learning, helping companies track processes, files, documents, images, workflows and any monitored data, and improving how content is used within the company. Companies constantly generate knowledge, data and information from a variety of sources across the organization. For example, production creates content every day on inputs, labor, raw material processing, etc. Finance produces accounting information, bank transactions, inflows and outflows, and stock market performance. Marketing is constantly creating content about products, competitors, customers, the brand and suppliers. All this information the company constantly creates is immeasurably valuable and useful; however, its validity and relevance also change quickly, and its value to the company declines. To keep it current and relevant, tools such as IFINDIT create a satisfying information search experience for users, connecting the data they need and presenting the most relevant information first. Using artificial intelligence techniques, they turn enterprise search engines into intelligent tools that anticipate needs and reduce search time, enriching the experience and surfacing information from across the company regardless of format, source or origin, accessed from a secure point with the information access permissions granted by the company. The R&D team gains global access to information that helps optimize and manage available resources, speed up product delivery, reduce costs, leverage intellectual property, understand the market and consumers to improve impact opportunities, minimize lost labor and worker downtime, and improve product quality and safety, but above all make processes more profitable. In addition, IFINDIT gives you a way to manage information efficiently. Through dashboards, information can be integrated into a single system, providing up-to-date answers to key questions in real time. Data can be connected faster thanks to innovative connectors that IFINDIT integrates with any database, system or repository. Users can also create their own views in predefined dashboards and build the ones that best fit R&D needs.
In conclusion, IFINDIT is able to use and leverage every piece of data and information across the organization, not just as a reference or a library, but by reacting to and quickly learning from the needs surrounding the R&D team’s objectives and goals and the demands of the environment. It efficiently teaches cross-functional teams to collaborate around gathering information and to share their work efficiently, so that companies can make better decisions, reduce organizational, production and sales risks, and stimulate and promote innovation.
Author: Creangel