News from ERNI

The digital transformation is rapidly accelerating the speed of innovation. Technological progress and social change are resulting in new products and services that better serve to satisfy the needs of consumers and which form the basis for new business models. At the same time, the possibilities of more intense collaboration have dramatically improved as a result of modern communication technologies.

Conventional understanding of the economy is based on a linear model; natural resources are extracted and processed into products. The consumer buys these and uses them. When they are worn out or are no longer needed the consumer disposes of the products. This model fails to recognise the high economic, environmental and social costs associated with the extraction, processing and disposal of raw materials and is therefore seen as unsustainable in the long term.

The 2022 edition of the European Congress of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine, also known as EuroMedLab, was held this April in Munich (Germany), after being rescheduled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Hundreds of delegates and visitors attended the congress, which took place from April 10^th to April 14^th at the International Congress Center of Munich.

Augmented reality is one of the big buzzwords that are decisively shaping Industry 4.0. In the IoT, the Internet of Things, machine and machine as well as man and machine are increasingly merging with each other. It is inevitable that this will also change people’s perception and thus their reality.

Human history is characterised by the search for more intelligent solutions for day-to-day problems. Whether it’s the hand axe, wheel or computer – without constant innovation there would never have been progress, simply stagnation. Innovation allows humans to accomplish more, gaining personal advantage more quickly than others with better or new solutions.

My first five months at ERNI were exciting and I learned a lot. Officially, I started my journey at ERNI (Germany) on the 2nd of November 2021. But I was given the chance to accompany our Managing Director and my people unit leader to a sales/get to know talk with a new customer even a couple of days early. As the recruiting process took place mostly online because of the COV-SARS II Pandemic, it was the first time I met our MD and the second time I met my people unit leader – right before we entered the customer’s office. I was excited and nervous, but they made me feel like part of the team from the start. We had a great appointment and I got extensive and appreciative feedback.

Once the decision to outsource has been made, the next question is: Which model should be chosen? For example, offshoring, nearshoring or onshoring? And how can you find a reliable partner who understands your corporate culture and goals so well that friction losses are kept to a minimum?

Here at ERNI, we foster interdisciplinary collaboration. This Technology Letter shows the collaboration within an interdisciplinary team. With our Experts in Agile Methodology, IoT and Machine Learning, we take a closer look at hyped buzzwords like Cloud Computing, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. But we move beyond the hype this time to the perspective of practitioners, who share their condensed insights and perspective. Of course, we won’t forget about business and how all the activities need to be linked together so business benefits arise – to close the loop.

Ecosystems belong to the future, don’t they? To explore this question, we talked to Bernhard Lingens from the University of Lucerne. He explained to us not only how ecosystems create innovations and become dominant, but also that there is often an easier way.

For any company just starting out with IoT or simply considering implementing it, it’s important to understand that IoT is more of a concept than a technology that you simply install. This paradigm shift presents a cultural challenge for many organisations as they try to derive the most value from IoT.

The availability of data from a wide variety of sources along with their evaluation and further processing without bureaucratic or technical hurdles sounds like paradise. What seems almost utopian at a time when, due to the pandemic, we are still frequently entering contact data with pens on paper, will be the status quo in many areas of our lives in the not-too-distant future. More and more data will be captured and stored digitally. With the corresponding spread of this digitalisation potential, a Data Paradise will be created.

Anna Bespalov is a Business Consultant at ERNI Germany. She has lived in Berlin since 1997, but was born in the former Soviet Union. Anna comes from Belarus, so the current situation is very close to her. That’s why she didn’t hesitate for a second to volunteer to help in the Ukrainian refugee crisis. She told us how each of us can get involved to create solidarity.

That is the fundamental question. It may sound exaggerated and pompous, but it is a question that arises with every digital business case: What does it really achieve? What real problem does it solve and what new problem does it create?

Human Machine Interface. What sounds like the invention of a science fiction film is in fact an elementary component of the new industrial revolution that is taking place around us at an ever-faster pace. In this new industry, man and machine, human and artificial intelligence are merging more and more quickly.

With evolving technologies more and more healthcare providers invest in IoT to achieve better patient outcomes, lower costs and improve efficiency. But does IoT fit into the healthcare ecosystem? Which benefits does it bring to different stakeholder groups?

As our population ages and the cost of care increases, the healthcare industry must find innovative ways to solve operational, clinical, and financial challenges.

Disruptive technologies can improve the pulse of healthcare. They are changing ways of working across the whole ecosystem. Big data, AI, mobile applications, 3D printing, advanced sensors and other technologies will continue to create new opportunities for medtech companies. Voice technology is being adopted faster than any previous technology, from chatbots and doctor visits, to home health care.

Some authors claim that human intelligence is growing exponentially. If you look at the development of the past 2000 years, it is easy to doubt this given the wars and atrocities. On the other hand, it is striking that at least the development of technology seems to obey the law of exponential growth.

The global pandemic, acted as a catalyst, reinforced the pre-existing transformation tendencies and increased the sense of urgency for businesses to focus on the right technologies and get the best out of them.

The little black dress among communication channels. It goes well with everything, always looks good and when you put it on, it fits like second skin – the blog. Here’s how it emerged from the niche corners of the early internet to become a perennial favourite, what you need to consider and what you get out of it.

Stories have shaped humanity like little else. They have brought people together and torn them apart, triggered wars and inspired peace. They are powerful! Even in marketing and corporate communication.

Have you ever stumbled upon a video on YouTube that was produced for Instagram and then watched the video in portrait format on your computer screen? Or did you click it away again immediately? That’s why it’s important to optimise content for different channels.

First there were tales told orally, then (cave) paintings and then the first written texts. The way we package our content has always been subject to change and even today new possibilities are constantly emerging. Here you can find out how to make use of them and what to look out for.

Digitalisation is the topic of the day. In a nutshell, it is about the increasing networking of the world. Of course, the bottom line is that it is not “the world” that is being networked, but devices and machines. The foundation of this transformation is so-called M2M or machine-to-machine communication. Very roughly, M2M refers to the automatic exchange of information between different end devices.

Data is driving the future of businesses, and companies not prepared for this transformation are at risk of being left behind. Let us uncover some facts and figures about Big Data.

Nowadays, companies face many digital challenges, especially with regard to current and future customer target groups and their needs. For a local bank, we looked at how to better serve customers in the digital space with the help of collected data.

Dr Stephanie Friedrich has focused on insurance fraud for years. In this issue of .experience, she spoke with us about the changes Big Data and analytics are bringing to the industry.

Smart and predictive maintenance refers to all technical and organizational measures that use digital tools, to rapidly increase the maintenance and service efficiency. Thereby on the one hand creating new business opportunities and on the other hand reducing costs. A central component of smart maintenance is the collection, processing and analysis of data from machines, plants and even whole production facilities. The goal is to detect errors and defects in advance, before they occur. This makes maintenance more effective and prevents breakdowns. It saves costs and resources. In this interview Anastasia Rachmann from ERNI Switzerland talks about why a company should invest into smart maintenance and what its advantages are.

The Swiss Banking domain is facing a change. There are factors and economical and political framework conditions which banks are exposed to. These conditions are making their existence a challenge, and if nothing changes, the financial institutions will lose their revenues and contact with the clients.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain are relatively new technologies, with the latter being the younger invention. Both are highly used all over the Internet as top tech buzzwords for attracting attention or intriguing the reader. This intrigue obviously exists, as you are curiously reading this article to find out more about this technological blending and how it impacts our society.

Today, more and more companies – from the manufacturing sector to the engineering industry – are starting to use digital twins to optimise products, refine processes and predict possible failures. What is the technology all about and when to take it into account – we spoke to Anastasia Rachman, ERNI Switzerland.

The perspective from which we look at health insurers is changing. With the shift to an ecosystem, insurers are transforming from a pure service provider to a health manager that accompanies the patient along the entire customer journey. This, in turn, has a huge impact on the perception of the customer – from the bad guy who doesn’t want to pay the treatment bills to someone who helps to manage the customer’s wellbeing to avoid future costs. This creates a whole new set of business model opportunities and exponential innovation within the healthcare industry, with many insurance companies tipped to become such a partner in healthcare. Accompanying the customer along the entire journey and orchestrating the various touchpoints and stakeholders has many benefits besides changing customer perception. Insurance companies can automate, control costs and create value – extending the value chain along the treatment path. Healthcare is no longer limited to business days and office hours. More and more, it’s about 24/7 treatment.

The healthcare ecosystem is expanding towards including new types of data, new methods for collecting and analyzing them, and including new players. The future of healthcare is likely to be driven by digital transformation enabled by interoperable data and open secure platforms. Health will likely be about maintaining wellness rather than responding to illness. According to McKinsey, 30% of global revenue will be attributable to ecosystems by 2025. It is expected that 12 distinct and massive ecosystems will form around basic human and organisational needs.

In our series Meet our experts, we move now from MedTech to the Manufacturing domain. Thorsten Ulbricht joined ERNI as Principal Consultant in the area of IoT. Read about his passion for all aspects related to IoT and Smart Manufacturing.

Have you ever wondered who the faces are behind our expertise? In our new series, we will reveal and introduce our teams working on customer projects in various industry domains. Today, we start with Ruben Rodriguez from ERNI Spain and will talk about his insights from MedTech.

Whether you are a young professional unsure which path to take in your career, a recruiter trying to better understand the role of a GUI (Graphical User Interface) test automation engineer or a project manager trying to get a better picture of the challenges faced in this role, this article is for you.

When we look at the evolution of technology in the diagnostics area, we can differentiate three main phases in the evolution of its intended use.

At the beginning, diagnostics companies were focused on improving analytic instruments in terms of accuracy, velocity and usage. In this first phase, the need appeared to centralise and manage the information provided by the instruments to improve medical decisions.

The second phase was focused in the automation of laboratories. Instruments were not isolated anymore. Step by step, the whole laboratory became a big interconnected system, and the sample workflows were centralised and controlled automatically. The focus was put on maximising performance and minimising human interaction.

Nowadays, we are finding ourselves in the first steps of the third phase in the area of diagnostics automation: use the technology for moving from sickness care to health care or, in other words, from being reactive to being proactive.

Intelligent apps are the core of smart businesses. They are, just as their name suggests, AI-enabled apps that use machine learning. The intelligence of the apps is derived from processing vast amounts of data and it has the ability to come to conclusions that are otherwise hidden to a human mind.

In the last year and a half, Stefan was assigned a project leadership mandate in the Med Tech Industry. We have met him for an interview, and he shares his lessons with us.

It has become obvious that being ready for a digital change has become one of the biggest challenges tech companies face nowadays and we will certainly all be a part of it.

This Techletter provides you with a brief overview of Apache Kafka, its concepts and its use and benefit in context of various architectural approaches and use cases.

The next PI planning is around the corner and your Product Management has already planned to bring a lot of new features for the customers. At the same time, your System Architects have planned to migrate some components to new services in order to be compliant with the company guidelines and the development teams are struggling with some technical debt that was always deprioritized in favor of new business features. How can you explain why we have to work on some enablers first?

Complex software development projects traditionally incorporate requirements engineers who elicit and define the requirements of a piece of software by means of various tools. Although the agile process assigns requirements specification responsibilities to the product owner, who may delegate tasks to the developers, highly skilled requirements engineers are a much-solicited role (at ERNI). As many companies are deciding to launch machine learning projects, we want to discuss the requirements that must be considered and understood by all stakeholders.

Agile is becoming more and more of a commodity, even in MedTech. There have been many conversations about whether the medical device design process could be enhanced by becoming more “agile”. Start-ups that are coming up are functioning this way from the start and the big players are introducing it as well. Read about our expertise not only on what challenges this brings but also what chances come with it.

Model-Based Systems Engineering allows a medical product development organization to handle the dependencies and interactions between the parties involved in the development through a formal, data-based system model.

Everyone who knows agile knows the Agile Manifesto. It covers the principles which formed the foundation of our agile mindset. In this article we deal with them in more depth.

Carlos studied Chemical Engineering in Valencia and just recently in April joined ERNI as the new QM and PQM responsible for global activities in the newly to be opened site. Read about his experience with the company during his first months.

On the backgrounds of the recent pandemics, good global activities arise. The ERNI Development Days (EDD) have always been held per country locally and in person, now for the first time in history all 800 ERNI employees took part at the very first global EDD held remotely.