Question

Use the time/Space Collaboration and Social Tool Matrix to classify the collaboration and social technologies ABB uses

Answer 1

Collaboration:

Collaboration is working with others to achieve shared and definitive goals. It focuses on accomplishment of a task or a mission and mainly it takes place in a business, or other organizations, or between businesses.

Collaboration can be short-lived or longer term, depending on the nature of the task and the relationship among participants.

It can be one-to-one or many-to-many.

The business benefits of collaboration are

1. Productivity: people working together in an organization complete the tasks faster and that too with fewer errors as compare to those who are working alone.
2. Quality: people can check errors and can correct them faster when working together as compare to those who are working alone.
3. Innovation: people working in groups can generate more innovative ideas than if they were working alone.
4. Customer service: people working in teams can solve customer complaints and issues faster and more effectively as compare to those who are working alone.
5. Financial performance: the collaborative firms have much sales, sales growth, and financial performance.

Social technology:

Social technology is a part of business organization’s structure for getting things done in a new collaborative way. It uses social networking platforms to connect employees, customers, and suppliers. The goal of social business is to deepen interactions with groups inside and outside a company to expedite and enhance information-sharing, innovation, and decision-making.

First, students should know following things to evaluate various enterprise social networking software capabilities, and to help them choose the most appropriate collaboration and social tools for the tasks. They should then use the “to-do” list to make sure they choose the correct collaboration software at an affordable price and within the team's risk tolerance. For these read the following Systems for Collaboration and Social Business which is explained below :

Students have probably used most of these systems without even realizing their business value. Your task is to relate these increasingly common technologies to business processes and needs. Discuss how they can use cell phones, instant messaging, social networking sites, and wikis in a business setting to communicate, collaborate, and share ideas with team members, business partners, customers, and suppliers.

One exercise you can use to reinforce the usefulness of team collaboration is to have small student groups explore social networking sites or Twitter to see how many postings by businesses they can find. For instance, Twitter has tweets for Free Honey Bunches of Oats at Walmart and a tweet for an article about General Electric’s solar technology. McDonalds used Twitter to solicit customer feedback but they were unprepared to address the negative comments.

Businesses also make use of YouTube.com to post videos of their products. This exercise will help demonstrate how businesses must constantly adapt their marketing strategies to reach customers. You can also generate a discussion about students’ experience on these kinds of sites in relation to business uses and ask them to relate how effective these new methods of engaging customers are.

Now we have to classify the collaboration and social technologies ABB uses.

ABB developed a new approach to better meet customer’s expectations: Using the latest technologies to reach the robots at customer sites around the world, ABB could support them remotely in just minutes, thereby reducing the need for site visits. ABB offers a flexible choice of service agreements for both new and existing robot installations, which helps extend the mean time between failures, shorten the time to repair and lower the total cost of ownership. With four new packages available – Support, Response, Maintenance and Warranty, each backed up by ABB’s Remote Service technology – businesses can minimize the impact of unplanned downtime and achieve improved production-line efficiency. The benefits of Remote Sevice are clear: improved availability, fewer service visits, lower maintenance costs and maximized total cost of ownership. This unique service sets ABB apart from its competitors and is the beginning of a revolution in service thinking. It provides ABB with a great opportunity to improve customer access to its expertise and develop more advanced services worldwide. ABB has thus created an intelligent product and platform with superior accuracy and long-term stability. For customers, it is a cost-effective means for process improvement that will definitely withstand the test of time.

Knowledge sharing with customers Increasing globalization and competition are two of the main issues facing companies today. These challenges can be met through long-term collaboration when companies and customers share expertise and experiences with one another. Building a team consisting of reliable partners with proven track records is critical. However, creating and maintaining appropriate long-term communication channels is a challenge facing this form of collaboration. In particular, developing the necessary language translators and tools is costly and time consuming. For example, transferring specific technological knowledge via general-purpose Matlab or Mathematics syntax; process knowledge via IEC61131/IEC61499 languages; specifications via traditional mathematical formulae; or software design

Successful cooperation between experts from ABB and its customers can make a difference. For example, when a plant expert identifies a problem or the possibility for some process improvement, models, simulations and optimization techniques available on high-end automation equipment can serve as real-time tools. Thus process improvements can be immediately carried out on the spot, something that was not possible in the not-too distant past. In such a situation, the following steps are typically taken:

1) The problem is identified and isolated.

2) Experts create a model that illustrates the problem.

3) Simulations are performed with the model to determine the parameters of the problem in the simulation environment.

4) Optimization searches for so-called “indifference curves” that may provide a solution to the problem are begun. This is the (abstract) space of parameters that give an optimal solution to the problem. The solution is a specific point within this space.