Five industries benefiting from drone inspections

The use of commercial drones to conduct inspections can significantly improve business operations across industries. These inspections increase precision, provide safer options for the workforce and drive efficiency. According to Quadintel, the global drone inspection and monitoring market was $7.47 billion in 2021 and will grow to $35.15 billion by 2030. This blog examines five industries that benefit from the fast-growing technology of commercial drone usage.

1. Infrastructure and construction

Infrastructure is critical for a society and an economy, but some of the world’s most industrialized countries face crumbling infrastructure, especially aging bridges. In the US, 1 in 3 bridges needs repair or replacement. In Japan, the number of aging bridges that restrict traffic tripled between 2008 and 2019. In the UK, over 3,200 bridges need repairs.

Traditional bridge inspections are tedious and require extensive human effort, but the use of drones piloted with artificial intelligence has the potential to save our crumbling infrastructure. Drones simplify the challenging task of inspecting and maintaining critical structures like bridges. In the construction industry, drones can validate that construction is in line with blueprints, and they can measure, transmit and store data for civil or structural surveys. Infrastructure managers can use drones to create a digital twin of the building or infrastructure to allow for faster decision-making and communication between various departments in large construction projects.

2. Search and rescue operations

Time is of the essence when searching for people who are injured or lost in the wilderness. Drones equipped with thermal imaging, zoom cameras, and lights can fly quickly over large distances to find lost hikers and guide them home. The Mountain Rescue Association of North America estimates that 80% of its members use drones as a critical tool in the search-and-rescue process.

3. Energy, utilities, and resources

Oil and gas enterprises and utility firms traditionally use helicopters to inspect refineries, offshore rigs, and power lines. Replacing helicopters with drones makes these tasks more cost-effective and sustainable. Many renewable energy companies use drones and zoom cameras to inspect solar panels and wind turbines. The mining industry now sends drones to inspect open stopes, which reduces the risk to human life. In these industries, drone usage is a part of business operations that increases efficiency and safety.

4. Insurance claims

When natural weather conditions devastate people’s homes and properties, drones can help insurance companies manage the deluge of claims. For example, a drone can inspect a home before the insurance company sends an adjustor to assess a roof damage claim. This streamlined process saves time and money for insurance companies. In a connected use, individuals who provide roof repair services can use drone imagery to show the owner the condition of their roof and to discuss plans for restoration.

5. Agriculture and agribusiness

Before drones, farmers manually inspected their fields, which could take days. Hundreds of acres of crops were at risk of damage during this lengthy process. With drones, farmers can now get an instant view of crop problems and focus on the remedy. Similar to utility and energy firms, large agricultural businesses can monitor their assets from above to ensure that shutdowns for repairs can be reduced to a minimum.

As commercial drones are deployed across the globe for inspections, drone relevance grows across multiple industries. Drone inspections increase accuracy, drive efficiency and protect the workforce. We can expect more industries to adopt these tools to maximize their business operations as drone technology progresses in the coming years.

Source: ibm.com

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How a hybrid workforce can save up to 20 hours a month

How productive would your company employees be if they could save two hours a day on regular tasks?

With the growth and evolution of today’s digital economy, companies face the challenge of managing increasingly complex business processes that involve massive amounts of data. This has also led to repetitive work, like requiring employees to manually perform data-intensive tasks when there are technologies available that could help free their time and automate tasks.

Read More: C2150-606: IBM Security Guardium V10.0 Administration

According to a WorkMarket report, 53 percent of employees believe they could save up to two hours a day by automating tasks; that equates to roughly 20 hours a month. Working on tasks that could easily be automated is probably not the best use of employees’ time, especially if your business is trying to improve productivity or customer service.

How automation and RPA bots can help improve social welfare

Let’s look at Ana, who is a social worker focused on child welfare and is entrusted with the safety and well-being of children. Like most employees, Ana does whatever it takes to get the job done. Her dilemma is that she spends up to 80 percent of her time executing repetitive, administrative tasks, such as typing handwritten notes and forms into agency systems or manually requesting verifications or background checks from external systems. This leaves only around 20 percent for client-facing activities, which is too low to improve long-term client outcomes.

Can automation make an immediate impact on the well-being of our children and improve the efficiency of the child welfare workers charged with their safety? Simply put, the answer is yes.

Social workers can shift focus back on the important work they do with the help of proven automation technologies. By combining automation capabilities or services, such as automating tasks with robotic process automation (RPA) bots, extracting and classifying data from documents and automating decisions can make a significant and positive impact in the entire social services industry. Watch the below video to see how automation creates more time for child welfare workers to focus on helping vulnerable children by automating repetitive administrative work.

As you can see from the above video, Ana is able to offload a number of her repetitive, routine and administrative tasks to a bot, freeing her to spend more time and effort towards improving the lives of children. The intent of bots is to augment human worker roles for optimal work-effort outcomes, not replace them.

How hybrid workforce solutions help bring freedom

In the future of work, a hybrid workforce will emerge. In this hybrid workforce, bots will work seamlessly alongside human counterparts to get work done more efficiently and deliver exceptional experiences to both customers and employees. The hybrid workforce of the future will allow human employees to focus on inherent human strengths (for example, strategy, judgment, creativity and empathy).

We’ve been enabling IBM Cloud Pak for Automation, our automation software platform for digital business, to interoperate with more RPA solutions. This interoperability gives clients greater freedom of choice to execute according to their business objectives. Our newest collaboration is with Blue Prism, a market-leading RPA vendor.

While our customers are increasingly seeking RPA capabilities to complement digital transformation efforts, Blue Prism customers are building out capabilities to surround their RPA initiatives — including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, natural language processing, intelligent document processing and business process management.

To enable greater interoperability between automation platforms, IBM and Blue Prism jointly developed API connectors, available on Blue Prism’s Digital Exchange (DX). These API connectors will help customers seamlessly integrate Blue Prism RPA task automation technology with three key IBM Digital Business Automation platform capabilities: Workflow, Data Capture and Decision Management.

This technical collaboration offers clients an automation solution for every style of work. This includes  immediately automating small-scale processes for efficiency and rapid return on investment (ROI), all the way to achieving a larger digital labor outcome through multiple types of automation.

Read the no-hype RPA Buyer’s Guide to learn how you can extend the value of your RPA investment by using an automation platform to establish new ways of working, maximize the expertise of your employees, lower operational costs and improve the experiences for our employees.

Source: ibm.com

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Innovate with Enterprise Design Thinking in the IBM Garage

We’ve all been there. You have an amazing idea that’s really exciting. Maybe it’s a home improvement project, or perhaps it’s a new business idea. You think about all the details required to make it real. But, once you get to the seventh action item, you’re not so excited anymore.

Sometimes when we realize the weight of the effort needed for our big ideas, it can crush our original excitement and momentum.

This is the crux of many failed initiatives.

So how can you move forward?

How to apply Enterprise Design Thinking and Lean Startup

Enterprise Design Thinking enables teams to think beyond what they consider possible and find truly innovative ideas. It’s about thinking big.

Lean Startup and a minimum viable product (MVP) are about thinking in small steps. What’s the smallest thing you can build efficiently to learn more about your biggest risk?

Combining the “bigness” of Design Thinking and the “smallness” of Lean Startup propels teams towards real solutions, but it can also trip up many teams. If you’re too focused on MVPs, you won’t come up with big ideas. If you’re too focused on big ideas, keeping an MVP to something that’s truly minimum is very challenging.

The key is that you can’t treat these as two separate exercises. They must be integrated seamlessly into one process. This lets teams think big but act small.

How IBM Garage Design Thinking Workshops help guide the journey

At the IBM Garage, our experts guide clients on their journey starting with a crisp definition of the opportunity they want to tackle. We then assemble a diverse group of stakeholders and users and bring them together for a two-day IBM Garage Design Thinking workshop.

Enterprise Design Thinking: Think big. Once assembled, it’s time to think big. In typical Enterprise Design Thinking style, we unpack the opportunity to find the part of the problem we want to tackle first — the part that once solved will have the most impact on the users and thus the business. Then we use the diversity in the room to find an array of innovative solutions to the problem, generally exploring more than 100 ideas before we focus in on the one with just the right balance between do-ability and awesomeness.

That right balance is different in every case, which is why having the right team of stakeholders and IBM Garage experts assembled is crucial. Technology is evolving so quickly that any one person’s notion of what ideas are and are not feasible is probably wrong. You need the team to be willing to proceed with the right idea, even if that idea initially looks risky.

Lean Startup: Find the approach. Day 1 of an IBM Garage Design Thinking workshop is about using Enterprise Design Thinking to think big. Day 2 is about applying a Lean Startup approach to drive that big idea to the right MVP.

First, we look at the vision and ask: “Are you confident enough in every aspect of this vision to be willing to jump in completely and invest whatever it takes to build it?”

If we really thought big on Day 1, the answer will almost always be, “no”.

Next, we explore all aspects of the vision that are holding the team back. For example, do they worry the market isn’t ready for the idea? Will the company legal team approve the project? Can we design something simple enough to allow the idea to reach the right audience?

Now, focusing on the biggest risk that the team wants to learn more about, we define a testable hypothesis, and identify the smallest thing needed to be able to test that hypothesis.

How to test the MVP solution

Some hypotheses can be tested without any coding, and if that’s the right MVP, of course, we do that. But the Garage has a bias toward building production pilots — we believe the best way to learn is by putting something real in the hands of real users.

Figuring out how to get something valuable into user’s hands in, typically, six to eight weeks requires as much creative thinking as identifying the big idea. This is why the IBM Garage views Enterprise Design Thinking and Lean Startup as two parts of a single method, not two separate phases of a project.

Client case study example: Mueller, Inc.

Let’s look at a real client example, Mueller Inc, a manufacturer of steel buildings and components.

On day one of the Garage Workshop, we arrived at a vision. The team wanted to build a mobile ordering tool to empower contractors to make accurate materials quotes and place an order, all while on the job at a building site. The vision was straightforward, but it was a huge, innovative step for their business.

We knew building the app was possible, but there was some cost-prohibitive data normalization and integration required to make it happen.

In defining the MVP, the team made the critical decision of restricting the scope of the application to only those parts needed for a single type of project. This allowed the team to limit the amount of data normalization needed and get something useful into production.

Within two days of going live, Mueller was transacting real sales through the app.

The MVP provided value to real customers by enabling them to complete order requests faster and proved that such a solution had market value. Plus, the MVP app gave the Mueller team a better understanding of how to normalize their data. All of that in about eight weeks. The perfect MVP.

That’s the power of combining Enterprise Design Thinking with Lean Startup. That’s what the IBM Garage can do for you.

Source: ibm.com

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Driving innovation for connected cars using IBM Cloud

Cars have always been built for travel, but the experience of driving has changed dramatically over the last few decades. Today’s connected cars are not only equipped with seamless internet, but usually have a wireless local area network (WLAN) that allows the car to access data, send data and communicate with Internet of Things (IoT) technology to improve safety and efficiency and optimize performance. The car’s connectivity with the outside world provides a superior in-car experience with on-the-go access to all the features one might have at home.

Traditionally, the networks supporting this robust connectivity, unlike cars, have not been built for travel. Data is stored in a home network in a local data center, which causes latency issues as the car travels and massive amounts of data are transferred across borders. In addition, privacy legislation, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), limit the transfer of personal data outside the EU, which not only creates a poor user experience on the road, but can impact safety-related IoT insights.

We at Travelping saw an opportunity to use cloud-native technologies for networking to help the automotive industry negotiate the challenges of cross-border data management regulations and improve latency issues for auto manufacturers looking to gain real-time IoT insights.

Road less traveled is most efficient

Travelping develops carrier-grade cloud-native network functions (CNFs) that are used to design software-defined networking solutions. Using IBM Cloud infrastructure products and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, we created a cloud-native solution that transports data directly to the vehicles, eliminating latency issues while fulfilling requirements for GDPR. We had strict technical requirements for our IT infrastructure and chose IBM Cloud for several reasons. IBM has a global footprint, which was key for us to provide networking capabilities in the cloud and better manage compliance with GDPR and European Data Security Operation laws, which was not possible on other clouds. Many clouds in the field are what we call north-south clouds. They terminate web traffic. Our solution forwards the traffic for our mobile users — what we call east-west traffic. IBM Cloud is the only one that still allows us to transport data from node to node in a network, and not just terminate it.

For us, one of the biggest advantages in choosing IBM Cloud, in addition to all the automation and speed, is that as a team of 30 people, we can deliver globally on a cloud platform that is deployed globally. And we don’t need to invest a penny for that; we can utilize computer resources that are virtually everywhere.

Software-defined networking is a radical change in the way networking is approached today as it brings the entire software development ecosystem close to the network, allowing operators to integrate all the network resources into the application domain. We moved to IBM Cloud Kubernetes and container deployment because you get an environment where you can run services that are rather simple in a five-nine — 99.999 percent service availability — environment. And it’s a five-nine environment that you get mostly for free, by following Kubernetes or cloud-native principles. With Kubernetes, there’s a common API. It works on private cloud and private deployment, but it also works in public clouds. You are totally agnostic, from developer notebook to private cloud deployments to edge deployments. You deploy in exactly the same way again and again. And this is only possible with Kubernetes.

Promise of 5G

For our industry, there’s a promise of 5G, and that cannot be fulfilled by the carrier alone anymore. There needs to be trust between operators and cloud providers to deliver a distributed infrastructure. Operators trust software vendors like us to create services for them. The whole 5G promise needs to be on more shoulders than it is at the at the moment, so that’s a little bit of a paradigm shift. It’s the first time in the mobile industry that we have had this shift. We need to create another infrastructure for communications services in the field, and that needs to be distributed; the cloud is the foundation for that. You don’t need to mount telecommunications equipment in owned data centers anymore because 90 percent of the spec is available in the cloud. You can book resources wherever you want to go. And this is a huge advantage — global carriers or local carriers can act globally and fulfill local regulations. A company from Germany can deploy in South Korea, as we have done on IBM Cloud. This was not possible in the past, but it’s possible today with cloud resources. In our experience, especially in Europe, IBM plays a role because it is a trusted partner of big customers, and therefore the entry was relatively easy for us.

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