As a Volvo employee, I had a chance to attend several sessions during the Innovation Days summit held a few days ago in Wroclaw, Volvo. There were several stories told, and it is nice that these stories are not just a mere theory; they are practised in some rooms of Volvo buildings.

Automation

Automation is visible in many business areas. One of these is a process automation. There is always some mundane work that can be automated, if you can use the browser to perform an action for sure you can use an automat to click on a webpage. One of the automation tools is UIPath and what is nice there is also BigData tool linked to it that allows for better control over the metrics.

convince them

Another presentation was about how to encourage your colleagues that they need an innovation. Of course, always there is a question about money and time. When may the busy workers have time to work on innovations? Maybe in their free time, they can find a slot. There is always some period-of-doing-nearly-nothing, so why not to utilize it?

UX

User experience is another hot topic. Why do you like software tools that you often use? Mostly because they are easy to use, you don’t need to read a manual to start using it. So when creating a tool remember, about not falling into aforementioned traps: don’t be too trendy, don’t overdesign, and don’t allow your user to be designer. The simple example was shown when a user had to use some complicated HTML form, and when it was simplified (fewer HTML elements, more open search capabilities present), the usage of a tool increased, and more user became happy ones.

Artificial and Business Intelligence

AI is really here. As you can see the global results here in Vera Car there are other teams utilizing Artificial Intelligence. The intro was very nice. At the beginning the question was posed: how do you know that an apple is an apple? Because you are able to properly identify and measure its properties, features. This is what AI and machine learning is about, but it is done by machine and not you. Do you fear AI progress in our lives? You should, cause soon you can learn, your job can be done by a machine better, faster, and cheaper! And at the end, I learned about QlikSense. There is no value from data that is not easily viewable and discoverable. The data you have brings value to your business if it can help you to conclude what your action is and make the right decisions. QlikSense brings value to you as it makes it possible to create dashboards and analyze your datasets, having easy to use dashboards and visualizations.