EXPLORING NEW FRONTIERS WITH INNOVATION
A fundamental digital transformation of everything is under way. Technology has always been a disruptor — but in our times, it is breaking long-standing business assumptions at an unprecedented pace. Businesses that do not recast themselves to keep pace with the new reality quickly become irrelevant. More than a third of the Fortune 500 companies from just a decade ago no longer make the list today.
This challenge of re-invention is no truer for any company than our own. For us, vitalizing the spirit of innovation is central to anything and everything we do — internally and with our clients. With this in mind, we have launched multiple game-changing initiatives like Zero Distance, Design Thinking, employee micro-entrepreneurship, partnership and funding for startups via the Infosys Innovation Fund, and strategic acquisitions
Closing the gap
Zero Distance is a grassroots initiative that makes innovation and creative thinking a mandatory deliverable for every project we do, regardless of its size. By continuously empowering our workforce with the latest cutting-edge tools and technical and design skills, we ensure that we are always pushing the boundaries of the possible. Together, these have created a rich culture of innovation-by-default, which has firmly established itself within the company, as is evident in every one of our interactions. With Zero Distance, we can simultaneously show the agility of a small entrepreneurial startup, as well as the stability, reach and scale of a large global company. And this makes us a trusted partner for our clients in both the traditional IT services domain, as well as in the next generation of digital transformation services.
In March this year, we celebrated two years of the Zero Distance program, and the implementation of 2,000 innovative ideas. Among these were key engagements with Aon Affinity, Colony Brands, and others. As Zero Distance evolves, we are also turning our focus to converting the best ideas to business solutions and IP that will help us drive new opportunities across industry segments
Platform power
We are redefining customer experience for Manufacturing, CPG and Financial Services with our next-generation platforms and micro-services. The acquisition of Skava has augmented our capabilities tremendously, and helped us build an integrated platform to provide modern micro-services-based architecture for industries at the cusp of a digital revolution, and those entering the era of direct customer outreach. We are creating flexible technical solutions that help our customers choose the specific commerce services they need, while retaining control over any aspect of it as they require. For a leading car manufacturer, we are building a direct-to-consumer platform that will leverage Skava’s high-performance, hosted micro-services platform on a custom user interface built outside of Skava.
In Financial Services too, we are using the Skava platform to create highly personalized loyalty services with superior customer experience. A leading CPG client was facing challenges in closing end-of-the-month financial reconciliations on time, owing to upstream issues in data, IT systems, business processes and synchronization.
We exported all relevant data to Infosys NiaTM, our next-gen artificial intelligence (AI) platform, and continuously analyzed failure points based on 300+ rules in order to alert global finance heads and enable them to take timely action. With this, our client recorded 99% improvement in master data quality, 100% right-time first-transaction rate, 98% buy-sell accuracy, and a record on-time closure success.
When an established staffing business facing threats from new business models and venture-funded startups expressed a desire to build a next-generation staffing platform, we became their innovation and co-creation partners.
We delivered a mobile-first, cloud-hosted marketplace within 12 weeks to help the client implement a shared digital economy model for one major market, with a roadmap to expand to 62 countries and across seven digital channels in the next five years. The platform is currently in production, and the client recognized our contribution with a Best Partner award for Infosys.
Our AI platform has also brought cutting-edge innovation to the shop floor for a European automotive client, helping prevent expensive equipment failures. We leveraged our expertise in Internet of Things (IoT) to design a predictive maintenance system. This is an end-to-end Industrial IoT solution for condition-based monitoring, predicting useful remaining life of spindles, and forecasting the failure condition of various components for machine centers.
Collaborating to win
We leveraged the Design Thinking methodology with a client to build a mortgage borrower experience targeted at Gen Y. A major banking client had no digital borrower capabilities, and the existing home buying process was believed to induce stress and confusion in customers.
With 62% of the market being Gen Y, we used Design Thinking and ethnographic research to identify the ideal digital borrower experience. Within four months, we launched a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that received a 4-star rating at the launch, besides winning the project team an innovation award from the bank.
We have been helping our retail and CPG clients mobilize multiple channels for some time now. More recently, we have been driving rapid omni-channel innovation through the EPOCH Cloud based Global Order Management platform.
With pre-configured process flows, this is one of the fastest ways for a client to implement its omni-channel strategy. Using this innovative solution, one of our largest clients has reduced omni-channel fulfillment costs by 40% and customer delivery time by 75%, and increased sales by 20% above business case targets. What’s more, features like same-day delivery, custom-designed products, and self-service kiosks are easier to implement for the client going forward.
The digital / physical world
In the hybrid physical and digital world of today, some of our clients are exploring the digital replication of real-world physical assets. These ‘digital twins’ help our clients improve the efficiency and health of the physical assets and monitor their performance based on cutting-edge analytics from a parallel, data-rich digital asset.
For a large European CPG company facing challenges in leveraging direct access to brand-loyal shoppers, we developed a unique Digital Rewards solution, in association with the largest loyalty and rewards service provider, to help the client get closer to the consumer. The creation of a personalized one-on-one channel allows shoppers to upload the physical point-of-sale
receipts through a mobile application to earn reward points for their brand shopping. More than 50 million shoppers have enrolled already, and the numbers are rapidly increasing.
We also helped transform the match-viewing experience for tennis fans, with the ATP Stats Leaderboards™, powered by the Infosys Nia platform. It is a powerful analytics tool that analyzes three parameters across decades of tennis matches played. It has brought the power of data to the fingertips of not only live commentators and tennis journals on ATPWorldTour.com, but has also spiked traffic to the ‘Stats’ section of the ATP’s official website by 27%, thus giving ATP the unique opportunity to monetize data.
Innovating for sustainability
The spirit of innovation is not limited to ensuring near-term business value, but also extends to building sustainable solutions. The cutting-edge smart connected building enterprise designed by the Infosys Facilities team across our Indian campuses is a leading example of innovation in the area of environmental sustainability. Using AI, machine learning, virtual reality and augmented reality to build smart appliances, intelligent devices and command centers, we have demonstrated substantial energy savings, and made available a wealth of data and best practices available for other organizations to adopt.
New challenges, new solutions
Innovation is a continuous journey. We challenge ourselves every day to bring innovative solutions to the table and to realize greater business benefits for our clients. As the pace of technological advancement accelerates, we continue to explore new avenues of business applicability from — connected devices, augmented and virtual reality, and legacy modernization, to — wearables, new technology frameworks and continuous collaboration with complementary ecosystem players. We are helping define, to ourselves and the rest of the industry, what it means to be a next-generation services company.