Digital transformation in companies generates more productivity and competitiveness

INDUSTRY DAY: Recovery Plan proposes four missions to boost the sector

Digital transformation aims to enable companies to expand their market scale and thus qualify to participate in global supply chains. The Confederation’s Industrial Policy manager, Samantha Cunha, assesses digital transformation as essential for the country’s productivity and competitiveness and recalls that small and medium-sized companies are important links in the production chains and need to participate in this transformation process in order to have an impact on aggregate activity, the economy and industry.

“Small and medium-sized companies, as CNI surveys show, adopt fewer digital technologies. When we look at large companies, more than 80% of them use at least one digital technology, among 18 types, in this survey that CNI carried out in 2021, this percentage drops to around 60% of medium-sized companies, and drops to around 40% of small companies”, he reveals. Only 7% of companies surveyed in 2021 adopted ten or more technological resources, according to the entity’s survey.

Lawyer and master in risk management and artificial intelligence at the University of Brasília (UnB), Frank Ned Santa Cruz, explains that digital transformation is associated with innovation. “Innovation is when you create an environment where you revisit processes, services, products and even people so they can do things differently. Innovation does not necessarily mean that you have to use technology, but it is very common for you to associate technology with innovation. When you have innovation associated with technology, you have this process of digital transformation”, he points out.

For Marcos Tupinambá Martin Alves Pereira, professor and researcher in the areas of digital law, electronic crimes and privacy, the digital transformation goes further: “It is a change in the mentality of companies, in which they seek to keep up with modern times, the current times, the technological advances and take advantage of these advances so that people, customers, employees and business processes can become more efficient. From the moment the company adopts this attitude, it is able to serve the customer better, create a better work environment and increase the efficiency of the business”, he evaluates.

According to Frank Ned Santa Cruz, to apply digital transformation in companies, it is necessary to create an environment of innovation. “It is necessary to create mechanisms to facilitate and encourage the creation of innovation. The result is better market reach and products meeting demands that were not met until then”, he reports. He explains that, as companies manage to reduce costs, they manage to be more efficient and this increases their market reach and also contributes to a better society.

With the digital transformation, professor Marcos Tupinambá Martin Alves Pereira says that companies will be able to increase productivity and competitiveness, but they need to change their strategic mentality in order to obtain positive results: “It is much more than structure, it is much more than what processes, the company has to take advantage of the customer network, create platforms, work with the assets, take advantage of everything the company has available to produce with more quality and better service”, he explains.

Missions for the resumption of the industry

The National Confederation of Industry (CNI) proposes four industrial policy missions in its Recovery Plan. Each one is presented with the identification of a problem, in which the current context of the theme in the country is presented, the proposed solution and the expected benefits from the adoption of each policy. For the implementation of each mission, work programs are suggested with specific actions to reach the stipulated objectives.

Check below the objectives of each of the missions

Mission 1: Decarbonization
Objective: to develop a low-carbon economy, with incentives for the decarbonization of industry, the energy transition and the promotion of the bioeconomy and the circular economy.

Mission 2: Digital Transformation
Objective: to train Brazilian companies, especially small and medium-sized companies, so that they can expand their market scale and thus become qualified to participate in global supply chains.

Mission 3: Health and Health Safety
Objective: universalize access and promote the competitive development of the production and export chain of medicines, vaccines, tests, protocols, equipment and services.

Mission 4: Defense and National Security
Objective: to support the development of strategic links in the defense and national security industrial complex chains, with a focus on technologies in current use.

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