News from ERNI

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.

There are many companies in MedTech, and more generally speaking in all industries, that are considering Predictive Maintenance and seeing huge potential in saving services costs and increasing customer satisfaction. The approach is part of their service strategy. Why is it important for the MedTech area?

Although we are able to influence certain aspects and features of the environment we show to our customers, we can’t control how they will be perceived.

Each touchpoint is an opportunity to excite your customers. We will show you how best to use these opportunities.

The right content in the right place might just be the one thing that turns a prospective buyer into a customer. People don’t want to search aimlessly; they want to be pointed in the right direction – so make sure they find their way to you!

A year has passed now since the start of remote work at ERNI in regard to the corona outbreak. How has the everyday working life changed and how do we tackle the related challenges? Today Joel Sommer from our Zurich site shares his tips for an efficient home office practice.

Every year, the number of companies that are involving end-users in the earliest stages of software development to gather and incorporate feedback as soon as possible rises. But there are still plenty of companies that are getting in touch with the end-user only after the entire product is released and ready to be used for the first time.

The IoT world is a big world that everybody is talking about. IoT products nowadays come in different forms –some are labelled as IoT, but in fact they represent only a small portion of what an IoT product really entails. A fully fledged IoT project not only requires programming and hardware expertise but also expertise on a broad range of domains from energy to smart home and even automotive.

The business world is influenced by trendy buzzwords, often tagged with the hashtag #. In this article I am taking a deeper look at three of those that are related to the current work setting: NewWork, Agile and Digital Transformation.

Travelling can be chaotic, so count yourself lucky if you have a map. It’s essentially the same for the customer journey, with one small difference – it’s not the travellers who need a map.

We are continuing our series on experiences of newjoiners at ERNI. Now, Georgi, our colleague from ERNI Germany speaks about his first year at the company.

Have you ever found yourself thinking about what drives us as people and keeps us motivated? Today, our colleague Barbara Schiller from ERNI Germany tells us about a book that changed her perspectives – Drive by Daniel H. Pink. Read the book summary.

How to keep team morale on a high level during remote work? That was the question I asked myself as a Scrum Master after the situation Covid-19 forced the teams to work from home.

Michal Piskozub joined ERNI Germany in January. He is part of the new team in Schorndorf and works as a Test Engineer. Read about his experience during the first month at the company.

Where do banks and insurance companies stand in the digital change? Where do they want to go and how is this to be achieved? For the purpose of situation assessment, ERNI has developed the Digital Maturity Fitness Check.

A month since Leonard started his journey at ERNI on 4 Jan 2021, he would love to share his discoveries with regards to ERNI. Some nuggets of information using the 10P’s for Business model that Leonard has created back in 2019, over a period of time he mentions here.

“Erni? Like Erni and Bert? No ERNI! So, my family and friends didn’t just react once when I talked about my new job”, says Florian Benzler. Here is his experience during the first month at the company.

With Kanban, the flow of tasks is being visualised. That is the basic perception people have about it. But Kanban can be also much more. Most of the users however do not know all the possibilities it offers. The basic use of Kanban is the tracking and overview of open tasks. Yet, as an experience, Kanban is often set up and drafted but then in the end not developing further. It is there, defined, but not really used.

We have many active communities at ERNI that make up our global team spirit. At ERNI Romania, the book club recently red and talked about the Midnight library. Find out what the members have to say about this book.

Backlog Refinement – formerly known as backlog grooming – is one of the meetings practiced in Scrum. It is a regular meeting where the Product Owner and the Development Team add detail, estimates and order to items in the Product Backlog. Read about what our expert Joffrey Zehnder has to say about his experience and best practices.

Nowadays, in a more digitised era, there is an increasing need to develop new applications faster and faster. Things are moving quickly and so is the demand for shorter time-to-market with lower costs. Serverless Architecture is a relatively new and rising approach that promises just that. We will explore the characteristics and benefits of Serverless Architectures to see how this can be an option worth considering the next time we go to choose our technology stack.

Leonard Cheong joined ERNI Singapore on 4 January this year as Managing Director. After his first 2 weeks, he describes his impressions and his onboarding process.

Technology has always been important in banking, as the long history of e-banking shows. But today, technological progress, changing customer behavior and the entry of new competitors have led financial institutions to intensively address the issue of digitalisation and the associated opportunities and risks. Our guest author Prof. Dr. Andreas Dietrich points out some of these developments.

Pavo Kohler joined ERNI in May 2016. In this interview, he summarises the book by Horst Schulze, Excellence Wins.

Mobile payment is growing rapidly. The proportion of contactless card payments in Switzerland has more than doubled in the last 12 months, while cash withdrawals from ATMs are declining. Since the beginning of the Corona crisis, payments have also been increasingly made by using mobile phones and Smartwatches. In a highly competitive environment, the brand profile of the providers is crucial.

Evert Smit joined ERNI in September 2018. Currently Principal Consultant, Evert is responsible for topics like Strategy, Change Management, Digital Transformation and Data Intelligence. In this interview, he summarises the bestselling book by Juval Noah Harari, Sapiens. He will also speak about how this book influenced him in his sales and leadership role.

Six ERNIans from the Spanish Agile Community attended the Agile in the New Normal event, allowing us to learn about recent tendencies, meet some new agilists and bring more knowledge to the Community and to ERNI. We enjoyed various keynotes related to Agile and how different companies are adapting to the ‘new normal’. Keep reading to find out more about this event.