Digital and technical transformation is affecting all businesses

Talking about digitalization, many people in different industries think that it will happen within other industries, but not in theirs. The fact is that things are happening much faster than we think and digital and technical transformation affects all business.

“When we start to talk about the digitalization, the immediate reaction from many people is that “Okay, it will happen to everybody else but not me” or “It’s all those other industries but not mine and I’ll be the last to be hit.” But I think the reality is that the things are happening much faster than we think. Some might say that the new technology is for kids or for fun, but most of these things can be actually used in real life. For example, a couple of years ago, 3D printing was more like a science-fiction. Today, Boeing, Rolls-Royce and other big companies are using 3D printing technologies to produce parts for their products, making the whole process more efficient,” explained Kęstutis Šliužas, CEO of Teo and Omnitel.

According to Šliužas, the digitalization is much closer than we actually think and if we don’t so see it immediately, we should look a bit harder. “In order to use the innovation at its best, we must look for different skills. For example, Tesla doesn’t hire people who have ever worked in the car industry because the company wants to look things in a new way,” Šliužas said.

Technological innovation affects environment, infrastructure and even public safety

Eric Michael Trusiewicz, Member of the Management Board of Cemex, said that technological innovation in general impacts industrial businesses very heavily - it has an impact on the environment, infrastructure and public safety. “Everyone globally understands that CO2 and global warming is a very big issue. It’s on the agenda of every national government and of the cement industry as well, because the cement industry actually produces 5 per cent of all global CO2 emissions. In Latvia, Cemex constructed a brand new modern factory that has allowed us to burn about 80 per cent recycled waste. So instead of digging fossil fuels up and creating CO2 in this way, we are burning tires etc. and produce exactly the same cement quality with much lower CO2 footprint.

Talking about infrastructure, Trusiewicz pointed out that the infrastructure in the Baltics, especially the road networks, is not optimal. Most of the money all of the three Baltic governments spend on the infrastructure in roads network, goes to maintaining asphalt roads which need a huge amount of investment just to remain a drivable. “Over the past two or three years, Cemex has started to apply climate materials innovation. For example, concrete is actually laid in the exact same way as asphalt, using exact same machinery and exact same technology. The benefit of this material is, it’s much less expensive to implement and that it needs some kind of reconstructive maintenance only after 25 years, not after every three or five or seven years like asphalt does. So this could help all three of the Baltic governments to reduce the infrastructure spending deficit and have less reliance on the European Union for funding the roads now,” Trusiewicz said.

Regarding the public safety aspect, Trusiewicz argued that anyone involved in the logistics would understand that all logistics activity has a high degree risk to the public. “In the Baltics, especially in Latvia, we have a very critical public safety risk and this comes from the fact that we have 30-40 or more ton trucks on the roads overloaded. So what Cemex has done in the past three years in the Baltics particularly, is taken a bunch of existing technologies that have become a lot cheaper - GPS, tachographs, mobile devices etc. - and used them in order to control all our contractors. So if we have in Latvia 500 or 600 trucks working for us, that don’t even belong to us, we make mandatory installations of this kind of technological devices and then make sure that if someone is driving our cement from A to B, they are not driving for three days and not endangering the public safety,” Trusiewicz explained. He added that those are a three examples of very small or basic innovations or use of existing technologies that companies can do with some idea, with some investment and try to impact positively public safety, environment or infrastructure.

Jānis Meistars,
journalist