Foreign guests from the euro zone, as well as the USA, Great Britain and the Gulf States have returned, Graubünden vacations wrote in a communiqué on Thursday. With around 5.6 million overnight stays, overnight stays in Graubünden increased by eight percent compared to the previous year.

However, Swiss guests accounted for more than half of the overnight stays. 3.74 million nights were booked by their compatriots in Graubünden. This was the second best result in history.

Boom in the international guest sector

However, the growth rates of foreign guests were particularly impressive. Compared to the previous year, for example, 431 percent more guests came from the United Kingdom. A look at the books of internationally oriented destinations such as Davos Klosters, Engadin St. Moritz and Chur confirms the boom in foreigners.

Graubünden Ferien wants to build on this and is on the hunt for guests with campaigns in the Asian region. By 2024 at the latest, they expect "a noticeable return of guests from China". Graubünden is also being actively promoted in the Gulf States and the USA.

The primary goal is to attract "even more guests", Martin Vincenz, CEO of Graubünden Ferien, was quoted as saying in the press release. To achieve this, the company wants to strengthen cooperation even more and make better use of trends.

Graubünden presented as a natural metropolis

Abroad, Graubünden is presented as a natural metropolis of the Alps, as Vincenz states in response to a question from the Keystone-SDA news agency. The aim is to promote nature-based and gentle tourism in a targeted manner. With various partners, the aim is to spread the desire to spend vacations in idyllic and unspoilt Graubünden locations.

Guests from distant markets also travel in the low season. For Graubünden, this means that with these guests, occupancy can be better distributed throughout the year. This in turn would increase value creation, and this is part of sustainable development, Vincenz said. (SDA)

Digitalization and efficient quality management in industry require more than digital technologies. Companies that want to use them to optimize their costs and production must start thinking in terms of digital processes. Moreover, the supply chain in industrial companies does not end at the factory gate. Before a product reaches the end customer in the desired quality, numerous suppliers often contribute components. In addition to internal workflows, external workflows with suppliers and, in the final stage, with customers are also the norm. Computer-aided quality (CAQ) as a cross-plant quality management solution simplifies such processes enormously. What an intelligent CAQ application can do today can be explained using the workflow-oriented software developed by Fabasoft Approve for data and document management in industry.

What Computer-Aided Quality must achieve today

With computer-aided quality assurance in incoming and outgoing goods inspection or document, complaint and test equipment management, innovative production companies can digitize essential processes from start to finish, across multiple plants. A CAQ system fulfills the following important requirements in terms of optimized quality management:

• Bring together quality-relevant information: CAQ establishes a cross-plant connection of essential quality-relevant information. This includes, for example, different ERP data such as technical documents or contractual agreements.
• Engage all relevant stakeholders: Both internal and external partners are integrated into cross-company quality management processes in accordance with their access authorizations. A shared data environment enables location-independent access to documents and at the same time meets the highest requirements in terms of data protection and security.
• Integrate and consolidate data: Especially for large, globally operating companies, the support of a CAQ system is indispensable. This aggregates data from different plants and collects it on one platform. This allows companies to standardize their quality processes.
• Flexibly carry out modifications: No two industrial operations are the same. Especially those who manufacture specialized and individual products depend on the fact that digital workflows can be modified at any time. A CAQ environment should therefore ideally be flexible enough to adapt to changing internal requirements at any time.

An issue for SMEs in particular

"With a CAQ system, small and medium-sized companies as well as global corporations can take their quality management to a whole new level. For example, our customer Siemens Energy has now digitized quality-relevant processes along the entire value chain at 14 locations in eight countries," explains Andreas Dangl, Managing Director of Fabasoft Approve GmbH, a European software provider for technical data and document management in industry. "As a specialist for industrial solutions in the power generation and transmission segment, which are also installed in critical infrastructures, quality assurance is essential for Siemens Energy. Our CAQ system actively integrates suppliers into quality management. As a result, Siemens Energy benefits from an increase in the quality of individual components as well as overall products."

Source and further information: www.fabasoft.com/approve

This article originally appeared on m-q.ch - https://www.m-q.ch/de/wie-computer-aided-quality-die-produktion-optimiert/

The term resilience is first familiar from the environment of stress management: a resilient person is good at dealing with stress and crises, quickly regaining their equilibrium so they can continue to act and react. Simply put, a resilient person can handle disruption well. But what does the term mean in the context of production processes? And what does it have to do with manufacturing IT?

Resilience and Industry 4.0

Resilience is now also one of the top issues in the Industry 4.0 environment. In a white paper published by the Platform Industry 4.0 defines resilience as follows: "Entrepreneurial resilience is the ability of a company to withstand external shocks or upheavals in the social, economic or political environment and to adapt to new conditions. To this end, the white paper sorts various measures on the one hand into the strategic fields of action of the "Leitbild 2030 der Plattform Industrie 4.0". On the other hand, they are assigned to the three impact phases of preparation, mitigation and adaptation.

So in industry, resilience means that manufacturing companies make preparations to be more resilient. In the event of a disruption, the impact should be as mild as possible. It is also a matter of considering possible adjustments to better deal with changed circumstances. This closes the circle, because the latter adjustments form the starting point for preparing for new disruptions. The distinction according to the strategic fields of action (according to the mission statement 2030 of the Industrie 4.0 platform: sustainability, interoperability and sovereignty) will be discussed again later.

Flexibility and adaptability

To better understand resilience in the Industrie 4.0 environment, it is useful to distinguish between flexibility and adaptability:

• Flexibility means that a company or production can respond to disruptions or requirements at short notice and temporarily. After a certain time, the situation returns to normal.
• Mutability on the other hand, means that production can change to be able to cope with the new conditions in the long term and permanently.

Resilience requires both capabilities, flexibility and mutability. The methods differ depending on the capability. Therefore, it is important to identify early on how to respond: flexibly or adaptively - i.e., short-term and temporarily or long-term and permanently. Example: A company should react flexibly to the failure of an expected delivery - rather adaptably to the insolvency of an important supplier or the failure of a delivery route.

Excursus: Matrix production

Beyond resilience, matrix production is another Industrie 4.0 trend that has significant implications for manufacturing IT. According to the expertise of the research advisory board of the Industrie 4.0 platform, "Implementation of cyber-physical matrix production systems," such systems are "characterized by a modular structure, flexible control and interlinking of production resources, and a high level of information technology networking." Here, both flexibility and mutability play an essential role, since there are short-term requirements on the one hand and long-term changes in plans on the other. The document also introduces the concept of reconfigurability. This describes the ability of a production system to be reconfigured as required within the change corridor (cf. changeability). In a matrix production, the capabilities that support resilience are used proactively to use the available resources more efficiently. Thus, a matrix production benefits from resilience.

Example: In contrast to a production line, changes can be deliberately brought about in matrix production in order to manufacture other products or products in other batch sizes at short notice - either temporarily or permanently.

Sustainability, interoperability and sovereignty

Resilience builds on the three strategic action areas of sustainability, interoperability, and sovereignty. Sustainability goes far beyond the economical use of resources. Rather, it includes everything that is necessary for production to take place at all. In particular, the role of people as well as education and work organization are of importance here. Interoperability means both the interaction of different (IT) systems and standardization along supply chains. And Sovereignty includes not only security of supply, but also IT security issues and the development of new technologies. Even though these are all big words, there are many starting points for manufacturing IT. Concrete examples illustrate this.

Examples of manufacturing IT in the sustainability field of action:

• The energy management of production IT records consumption of all kinds and makes energy consumption plannable. As a result, external disruptions can be translated more quickly into changes to plans. In addition, targeted savings measures ensure that cost increases have as little impact as possible on production costs.
• Worker management as part of assembly processes ensures that even unskilled employees are quickly trained. This in turn is a good measure to counteract the shortage of skilled workers. On the assembly process modeling side, low-code and no-code ensure that fewer programmers are needed, which are also in short supply on the labor market.
• By means of qualification-based workforce scheduling, human capital is optimally utilized. At the same time, employees' skills can be tested and promoted on a time-controlled basis.

Examples of manufacturing IT in the field of action Interoperability:

• Based on open platform approaches, applications from different providers can be easily combined with each other. This creates a living ecosystem and significantly reduces dependence on individual providers. MPDV Mikrolab GmbH has developed the Manufacturing Integration Platform (MIP) for this purpose. More than 50 providers have already developed so-called mApps for the MIP, which can be combined with each other as desired.
• Manufacturing IT functions for material and inventory management ensure that it is always known when which material is needed and whether sufficient material is available in production or in the warehouse. This makes it easier to deal with disruptions in the supply chain.

Examples of manufacturing IT in the sovereignty action area:

• By using modern technologies such as artificial intelligence, manufacturing IT gets the most out of its own data. This enables manufacturing companies to identify deviations earlier and react to them more quickly.
• If quality assurance is also integrated into the production IT system, a holistic supplier evaluation can be carried out thanks to the comprehensive use of quality data. The aim here is to be able to compensate for any disruptions in the supply chains with alternative procurement options.

Manufacturing IT: Equipped for the future

Ultimately, resilience is based on the sum of many measures and methods for preparation, mitigation and adaptation. At the same time, a broad spectrum of fields of action has an influence on the resilience of production. From a distance, it doesn't look like manufacturing IT plays an important role. But the opposite is the case: manufacturing IT has a small impact, but in total it has a large impact on the whole. Depending on the company, different use cases are more or less relevant.

Author:
Markus Diesner is Senior Marketing Specialist Products at MPDV. You can find another article by this author here.

This article originally appeared on m-q.ch - https://www.m-q.ch/de/trends-der-fertigungs-it-2023-resiliente-produktion/

New quality indicators for hospitals and the software "Qlize!" were developed from several research projects at the University of Lucerne funded by the Swiss Agency for Innovation Promotion (Innosuisse). The development was led by Dr. Dr. Michael Havranek, Research Director of the Competence Center for Health Data Science, in cooperation with industry partner INMED and various hospital partners. The indicators have now become part of the mandatory measurement plan of the National Association for Quality Development in Hospitals and Clinics (ANQ). ANQ licenses and finances the software system and makes it available to all Swiss hospitals and clinics as well as to the cantonal health departments. The final part of the program's "rollout" took place on February 17.

Initial focus on unplanned re-entries

In the first phase, thirteen quality indicators on unplanned readmissions after hospitalization will be used to assess the quality of treatment provided by hospitals. However, the software contains more than 30 additional quality indicators on complications and deaths during hospitalization, which can also be used in the future. All indicators were developed using internationally established principles, which were further developed based on the conditions of the Swiss healthcare system and tested together with seven hospital partners.

The special feature of the software developed is that it enables hospitals to analyze their own treatment quality down to the smallest detail. On the one hand, the hospitals can check their own quality results in a statistical comparison with other hospitals. On the other hand, they can also narrow down their results across different patient groups down to the individual case and relate them to expected rates from prediction models. The prediction models used for this purpose were calculated on the basis of all Swiss hospitalizations and use methods from the field of artificial intelligence.

Data protection compliant approach

In order to be able to offer such detailed evaluation options at all, despite the strict data protection requirements, it was necessary to develop a two-stage procedure. First, the data supplied by the Federal Statistical Office (FSO) for the whole of Switzerland is evaluated annually in order to provide the hospitals with their official quality results in statistical comparison with the other hospitals. Subsequently, the calculated prediction models are applied to the data provided by the hospitals themselves to enable them to make case-based comparisons with the expected rates.

In this way, it is possible for hospitals to analyze targeted groups of patients or even individual cases. For example, they can identify cases in which a low probability of a quality-relevant event (such as an unplanned readmission) was predicted, but such an event nevertheless occurred (e.g., due to a surgical complication). In order to communicate the diverse evaluation options in this regard, Michael Havranek had held two nationwide training events with simultaneous translation in French and Italian at the beginning of February on behalf of the ANQ, which were attended by around 150 hospitals.

Source: Lucerne University

This article originally appeared on m-q.ch - https://www.m-q.ch/de/neue-qualitaetsindikatoren-fuer-spitaeler-eingefuehrt/

In recent years, the cloud has become somewhat synonymous with IT as organizations seek greater business agility and improved operational efficiency through the technology they use. Although these trends have been around for some time, more than 90 % of respondents agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic was a strong driver for greater interest and investment in cloud technology.

The path to a multicloud strategy

As companies faced new challenges, such as increasing telecommuting and working with new business partners and suppliers, they adopted a multicloud strategy to get the flexibility and scalability they needed to address this new reality. "The 'one-stop store' mentality is dead when it comes to the cloud. Instead, multicloud is the reality of enterprise technology environments as companies try to get the right mix of solutions and capabilities they need to operate effectively," said Melanie Posey, research director, Cloud & Managed Services Transformation at 451 Research. That company conducted a study on behalf of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It gathered information from 1500 enterprise respondents (organizations with more than 1,000 full-time employees in North America or more than 500 in other regions) on how they use the cloud in their organizations. It found that almost every cloud journey is becoming a multicloud journey. "Multicloud is here to stay, and organizations are choosing it because of the benefits it offers for a range of different business and operational needs, such as enterprise flexibility or access to best-in-class technology."

Almost every cloud journey is multicloud

According to the survey, 98 % of respondents use or plan to use at least two cloud infrastructure providers, and 31 % use four or more. Ninety-six % said they use or plan to use at least two cloud application (software-as-a-ser-vice) providers, with 45 % using cloud applications from five or more providers. This multicloud strategy enables IT departments to meet the specific technology needs of different teams across the enterprise.

The top two drivers of enterprise multicloud strategies are data sovereignty (41 %) and cost optimization (40 %). Other drivers of multicloud strategies include enterprise agility and innovation (30 %), best-in-class cloud services and applications (25 %), and cloud vendor dependency concerns (25 %). Multicloud strategies give organizations more control over where and how their data is stored and used. They also ensure that enterprises can control the cost of their cloud operations by adjusting which services they use from different providers.

Various use cases

Data redundancy (54 %) is the most anticipated future use case, followed by data mobility (49 %) and cost optimization via public clouds (42 %). IT departments also plan to use multicloud strategies to mitigate risk across the IT environment (40 %) and geographic expansion or global service delivery (38 %). The fact that IT departments are planning multicloud strategies shows that they see this as an opportunity to stay ahead of their technology needs, and not just as a tactic to respond to crisis situations.

"Multicloud is a reality whether enterprises are ready for it or not. Enterprise mergers can transform even the most robust IT strategies into a multicloud environment overnight," said Leo Leung, vice president, OCI and Oracle Technology. "Whether IT teams are starting their multicloud plans from scratch or already have an implementation but want to add best-in-class cloud services, OCI's distributed cloud can help. With the recent launch of MySQL HeatWave on AWS and Oracle Data-base Service for Microsoft Azure, customers have even more options to make their multicloud strategies a success."

Source: Oracle

This article originally appeared on m-q.ch - https://www.m-q.ch/de/multicloud-als-neue-realitaet-in-der-unternehmenstechnologie/

The Alfa Romeo F1 Team Stake will continue to rely on Edelweiss as its Official Airline Partner in 2023. It is already the third season in which Edelweiss offers direct charter flights from Zurich to the F1 Grand Prix race tracks within reach of the A320 fleet, according to a recent media release. The collaboration began in 2021, when Alfa Romeo Racing ORLEN was still looking for a Swiss partner during the pandemic.

Patrick Heymann, Chief Commercial Officer of Edelweiss: "I am extremely pleased and proud that the Alfa Romeo F1 Team Stake has placed its trust in us again this year. Moreover, it is important for me to mention that the team has been climate neutral since 2011 and that our flights are also compensated."

Viva, Las Vegas!

The new Formula 1 season starts on March 5, 2023 in Bahrain and will feature one more race this year. The second-last stop on the schedule is Las Vegas from November 16 to 18, 2023. Edelweiss will fly the team to Las Vegas on its regular scheduled flight at the end of November. On the Las Vegas Strip, the race will be held on a 3.8-mile course right in the neon heart of the city. Past world-famous landmarks, casinos and hotels.

AtlasVR has developed a VR software platform that opens up new possibilities for industrial training and remote support. The startup targets machine manufacturers in the mechanical engineering, electrical and metal industries, offering virtual training modules tailored to their customers' specific use cases.

VR training solutions with advantages

VR training has many advantages: it requires no prior VR-specific knowledge or technical expertise, is location-independent, and eliminates the need for direct interaction with equipment and raw materials, making training safer, more accessible, and more cost-effective. This solution also addresses the skills gap and shortage, while helping customers serving a global customer base, as the VR training solution can be delivered with machines or equipment sold.

Investment won from Venture Kick

The company is targeting the global market for frontline worker training, which was worth CHF 16 billion in 2021 and continues to grow at a CAGR of 16 %. AtlasVR has won several reference customers, including suissetec, Swisscom and RhySearch, and has around 80 leads in the pipeline. The startup will invest the CHF 150,000 awarded by Venture Kick in business development to prepare the product launch of its scalable and customizable VR training platform.

ETH spinoff

The company, which has now grown to a team of eight and plans to hire more employees by 2023, was founded by Joy Gisler, Dr. Valentin Holzwarth and Christian Hirt, all of whom hail from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, where they researched VR training applications in mechanical engineering and computer science.

"Venture Kick's impetus to get in touch with potential customers not only helped us to gain a foothold in the market, but also made us attractive to investors," says Holzwarth. "That was exactly what we needed as a technical start-up team."

Source: Venture Kick / AtlasVR

This article originally appeared on m-q.ch - https://www.m-q.ch/de/startup-entwickelt-vr-trainingsloesungen-fuer-die-industrie/

Occupational accidents are undoubtedly among the most biggest possible disturbances in companies not least because they can occur in so many different forms and cause the most serious consequences. In principle, they range from employees tripping and injuring themselves to collapsing high-bay racks, major fires and sometimes even massive consequences for entire regions. Let us think of one of the most serious Swiss industrial accidentsthe major fire at Sandoz in 1986 - most likely caused by incorrect shrinkage of plastic film during palletizing.

Now Switzerland knows Numerous legal requirements for accident prevention. Among other things, this includes the obligation to provide instruction. Quote from Art. 6 VUV:

"The employer shall ensure that all persons employed in his company are
employees, including those who work there, as well as the
Employees of another company, sufficient and
be adequately informed and guided about the
hazards that may arise during their activities and about
the measures of occupational safety. This information and
Guidance have at the time of starting the job and at each
substantial change in the working conditions to take place
and shall be repeated if necessary."

However, this "adequately informed" can be approached in different ways. We will now show you which ones.

Instructing employees on safety

1. Movies

As early as World War II, the U.S. was using films to train soldiers. On the one hand, this decoupled learning from the didactic skills of the instructors. On the other hand, because films can get to the heart of certain issues in the language of the target group. To this day, educational films are therefore also a common teaching tool in the field of occupational safety worldwide, but this is linked to various negative facts:

• Permanent attention needed.
• Often only general, not related to the specific work location.
• Sometimes irrelevant/outdated information.
• Entertainment value may exceed information value.
• Hardly any opportunity to repeat knowledge.
• Elaborate and expensive to produce.

2. Presentations

The presentation is similar to the film approach. However, it is more suitable in that multimedia information is conveyed using slides, photos and clips, supplemented by additional explanations from people present. This allows a much better response to the audience, and in addition, a presentation can be adapted to changing requirements with little effort. The disadvantages:

• Good presentations depend at most on the skills of the presenter - both during the instruction and when designing the slides.
• Every presentation is slightly different, even if the same person gives it with the same slides.
• Recording and thus knowledge repetition only possible via detours (videos).

3. Handouts and catalogs

It is not for nothing that most operating instructions are still enclosed in printed form. Because the written word is extremely patient, inexpensive to implement and, above all, everyone can go through the information conveyed again and again without their own intervention (such as taking notes) - without the need for an accompanying person. Moreover, such handouts can easily be turned into a gateway to the digital world. Then, when they are combined with a really powerful tool the QR code. It can, for example, lead to clips supplementing the written information at the appropriate point, can initiate final tests or build a wide variety of other digital bridges. Since the QR code basically only requires a URL, it can conceal anything imaginable.

But do these facts make handouts the best approach for safety briefings? Not necessarily:

• Readers must be able to speak the language
• Reading and comprehension are two separate requirements - the worse the writing, the harder the comprehension.
• No way to verify an intensive read-through and understanding by all employees - at least not without testing.
• May seem too dry on some characters due to its nature, which significantly reduces attention.

4. Comics

Comics manage to tell complex stories with just a few drawn pictures, and sometimes even without any further text at all - and not just for children. Once again, it was the military that chose such an approach early on, in order to to explain concrete facts. The advantage is the possibility of conveying very specific, complex information, since comics do not rely on text alone, but an illustration. Furthermore, even comics on rather dry topics can get attention through an exciting design - and sometimes even be cross-linguistic. The disadvantages of classic written handouts are therefore greatly reduced. However, comics are not perfect either:

• Creation requires graphic expertise. Almost anyone can write, but not draw.
• Can sometimes seem too infantile to some contemporaries.
• Due to the scope, rather suitable only for specific topics, such as "Safety check on the forklift before starting work".

5. Online courses

In principle, a website can display anything that is desired within the framework of the programming language used and the available storage space. As a result, it can naturally also be a means through which an enormous range of safety information can be conveyed to new employees.

Written, pictorial, linguistic, all of these can be applied here and can also be repeated by the subjects themselves as they see fit. In fact, the entire briefing can even be designed in a way that makes it possible to measure usage - for example, via a dwell time on the respective slide or the need to click on several pieces of information before the next page can be called up.

There is only one disadvantage to this, but it is a big one. Because a lot of technical and IT expertise is needed to set up such courses. The higher the quality, the more expensive and time-consuming it becomes.

Safety briefings: the mix makes the difference

You may have noticed: None of the methods presented here is perfect on its own - if only because it is costly. While no company should put a price tag on something as centrally important as safety briefings, a certain framework must of course be maintained.

But what is the best approach under this premise? It is always a balanced mix of several methods. Perhaps the best basis is a clean presentation, especially if several new team members are to be instructed at the same time. Everything can be packaged very well in that.

A handout is issued to supplement this. On the one hand, it should contain the same content as the presentation slides. On the other hand, it can be supplemented with further written and comic-like information. Where it makes sense (e.g., with videos), a QR code should always be integrated that links to the corresponding digital content - especially for younger generations of digital natives, this is highly recommended.  

With this approach, safety briefings become more than just a one-time instruction. It becomes a multimedia code of safety that can be looked up and added to again and again. If this is cleverly combined with realities of the work environment (for example, by using the same designations at the work site), then it becomes information transfer that really sticks in the mind - and thus helps to prevent large and small workplace accidents.

This article originally appeared on m-q.ch - https://www.m-q.ch/de/sicherheits-briefings-fuer-neue-mitarbeiter-moegliche-methoden-und-herangehensweisen/

The hunger for information in marketing is far from satisfied. The journey toward data-driven marketing will continue unabated in 2023. The primary goal is to identify the best possible sales potential, including risk analysis and the creation of a 360-degree view. The topic of third-party cookies and their stop in Chrome is also still on the table. Google has postponed the deadline again, this time to 2024.

Marketing Trend #0: Data Drivenness on the Rise

Data Drivenness is our "Trend Zero". This is where it all begins in marketing: the appetite for data and insights, and even more so the ravenous appetite for performance and conversion. Data driven, however, is not an end in itself, but has become the panacea on the road to efficiency. Tell me how data-driven you are, and I'll tell you how successful you are.

Data Drivenness will continue to increase this year. The number of MarTech tools is increasing, as is the amount of data. The methods of gaining insights from it are also getting better and better. Data Drivenness has the task of increasing the efficiency of marketing, the ROI. It does this on two levels. On the one hand, data makes it possible to address the right target persons and groups in a relevant and personal way; on the other hand, it makes it possible to automate and digitize. Where processes run automatically, the degree of manual work decreases. But there is no other way to manage complex marketing machinery.

Marketing Trend #1: Third Party Cookies

The discussion about third party cookies is a perennial topic within the marketing community. Or as Ralf Strauss, editor of the Marketing Tech Monitors, expresses it: "Google is shooing us away". Again and again, the date is postponed. From the second half of 2024, Chrome will probably definitely not allow the use of third-party cookies. "Assume that third party cookies are gone," Strauss continued. For companies, it will be important to build their own audiences and populate them with content.

Marketing Trend #2: Content Marketing

If content marketing was ever dead, it's experiencing a revival in 2024. This comes in part as a result of the "third party cookie" issue and building your own reach. If I have my own audience - people who give me permission to share content with them on a marketing basis - then I have to think about which story to play to which target person.

Relevance instead of mass is the basic principle here. It makes zero sense to play everything out to everyone. It's more effective to send the relevant content to the right target person. Keyword data-driven.

Marketing Trend #3: Data Analysis

In order to get relevance into content marketing or campaigns in general, it is imperative that I analyze my data. Which brings us to the next trend: data analysis of your own first party data. It's all about identifying the valuable companies in the CRM data set. This helps me to drive growth within the existing customer base, but also to create the basis to attract ideal new customers.

So it's all about quality instead of quantity. Today, no one can afford to spend sales resources and time on the wrong prospects. This leads to idle time and frustration - and at the end of the day to a poor result.

Marketing trend #4: Golden Record and 360-degree view

A core aspect of Data Drivenness is the creation of a 360-degree view of customers and interested parties. It is therefore about the "golden record" and the consolidation of data. This includes duplicate management as well as breaking down data silos by using a unique identifier. Consolidate all data to the one and right company is the motto of data management. If employees have no knowledge of a customer interaction in channel XY, then that's a problem.

Master data governance is becoming increasingly important in this context to consolidate data and map the 360-degree view of business partners. SAP's governance tool is an example of this. It helps to define guidelines within organizations as to which criteria data must meet and ensures implementation.

Marketing Trend #5: Risk Management

Sun Tzu already knew: "He who knows when to fight and when not to fight will be victorious." This leads us directly to the fifth marketing trend, risk management. Successful marketing and sales teams engage exclusively with leads that they know - or have a high probability of believing - will result in a deal. In practice, these are companies with a current interest and short sales cycle.

But successful sales teams only deal with companies that are solvent and adhere to compliance requirements. A deal with a business partner who does not pay or who turns out to be acting unethically quickly turns out to be a defeat. They sort out high-risk leads before sending them on to sales. Potential business partners are screened manually using data and information or in an automated onboarding process. Here, too, the keyword is data-driven.

Marketing Trend #6: AI and Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have now established themselves as lead generation methods. The whole thing is called smart data analytics and promises to generate leads with an accuracy of up to 90 percent in the B2B sector. Which do you prefer? Searching for a needle in a haystack or endlessly phoning lists in the hope that someone won't turn you away? Or working a list where three quarters of the contacts or more have an interest?

Smart Data Analytics is based on AI and Machine Learning. In an iterative process, an algorithm searches for companies with specific interests and criteria. Feedback on accuracy is fed back into the process, improving the quality of leads with each iteration. Data-driven, that is.

Marketing Trend #7: Automation and Data Integration

As trivial as it sounds, automating processes is and will remain one of the main tasks of data-driven marketing. A core aspect of this is data integration. Björn Gerster, Director Marketing Consulting DACH at Dun & Bradstreet, sums it up as follows: "The companies that come to us have understood that further external data will take them further." It's about making the right decisions and identifying the most promising sales potential.

Companies need very specific external data for each use case. Once they have been identified, the next step is to integrate them into the systems and processes. Very often, IT resources are very scarce. That's why the plug-and-play principle in the form of standard connectors is becoming increasingly popular. They enable quick and easy integration to the most common marketing tools such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Hubspot, Marketo and many more. The end result is an automated process based on valid and correct data. Data-driven, that is.

Marketing Trend #8: The Battle for the Marketing Budget

In crises, or when things are not going well, the marketing budget is usually the first to be cut. CEOs are usually reluctant to spend money even in "normal" times. What they hate is flying blind. This makes it all the more important as a CMO to present the right arguments and airtight evidence in the discussions.

When it comes to budget negotiations, those marketing leaders who have implemented clean attribution models have the best cards in their hands. They can prove in black and white that their measures are successful. Even better: which campaign results in which business transaction. Data-driven, that is.

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* Matthias Schneider has been a content marketer at Dun & Bradstreet in Zurich for six years and writes articles on marketing, sales and data management.

"We are extremely pleased to receive the Best Employer award for the second time in a row," CEO Christoph Zweifel told Handelszeitung. "It makes me personally enormously proud to be able to lead this company." Behind Doubt the Schindler lift company ranks ahead of the two watch brands Rolex and Breitling. They are all well-known favorites as best employers. However, a castling took place in the subsequent ranks: Newly represented in the top ten are the Swiss Southeast Railway, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne EPFL and the sanitary company Geberit. The Handelszeitung and Statista select the 250 best employers in Switzerland every year. The ranking is based on an independent survey of Swiss employees via online access panels as well as via the website of the Handelszeitung. More than 1500 employers employing at least 200 people in Switzerland were identified for the survey.

Low value care refers to services that provide little or no benefit to patients or even potentially cause harm. This results in unnecessary costs and scarce healthcare resources are wasted or not used effectively.

New study examines impact of low value care on two chronic diseases

A new study by the University of St. Gallen with data from Groupe Mutuel examines two aspects of the care pathway of two widespread chronic diseases on Low Value Care. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and coronary heart disease (CHD) were chosen for this purpose due to their prevalence and the high level of patient suffering.

COPD was the third leading cause of death worldwide in 2019. In Switzerland, at least 400,000 people suffer from the incurable lung disease, at an estimated cost of CHF 603-847 million per year. Appropriate use of medications can slow the worsening of symptoms, stabilize quality of life and reduce the risk of hospitalization due to an acute worsening of health - a so-called exacerbation. Accordingly, analysis of Groupe Mutuel data shows that patients who regularly take long-acting medications have an approximately 50% lower risk of experiencing an exacerbation.

The problem is, among other things, that medications are not taken as prescribed, e.g. daily. The study shows: Nearly half of patients had adequate medication reserves at home less than 40% of the time. This means that a significant proportion of patients do not take their medications as prescribed over a period of time. This can lead to exacerbations, which also have a negative impact on healthcare costs. The analysis of the Groupe Mutuel data accordingly shows that the healthcare expenditure of COPD patients who do not take their medication regularly is on average around CHF 10 000 higher compared to patients who take their medication regularly.

"The results of this study indicate that it is time to develop digital health applications for chronic diseases. This could better ensure structured quality-optimized treatment programs that, for example, help patients take their medication as prescribed," says Alexander Geissler, Academic Director and Chair of Healthcare Management at the University of St. Gallen.

Too many invasive/cost-intensive diagnostic procedures

CHD is one of the most common cardiovascular diseases and a leading cause of mortality and hospital admissions in Switzerland. The study weighs the two diagnostic pathways of coronary CT versus invasive coronary angiography. Medical guidelines indicate that coronary CT is preferable to invasive coronary angiography for initial diagnosis in many patients. A coronary CT is noninvasive and there is no need to place a catheter in the heart, meaning there is no risk of anesthesia, infection, or complications for the patient. At the same time, it incurs less cost. The study finds that thanks to an optimized diagnostic pathway, there is a potential saving of approximately CHF 5 million per year for Groupe Mutuel policyholders when patients are treated using the cost-efficient diagnostics.

Through this commissioned study, Groupe Mutuel aims to contribute to improving the quality and efficiency of medical care for its policyholders: better outcomes at lower cost and risk increases value for patients. "Regarding research, our current focus is on overuse and misuse of care. It is becoming increasingly important to address existing inefficiencies in our healthcare system as resources become scarcer, making overuse and misuse of care particularly problematic in terms of low value care," says Daniel Volken, Head of General Secretariat at Groupe Mutuel.

Source: Groupe Mutuel

This article originally appeared on m-q.ch - https://www.m-q.ch/de/low-value-care-ueber-bzw-fehlversorgung-unter-der-lupe/

Artificial Intelligence of Things focuses on collecting, analyzing and interpreting data from machines and sensors with the help of an MES/MOM. In this way, for example, forecasts can be derived and self-learning processes can be developed. There are several options for implementation.

Artificial Intelligence of Things: Symbiosis of AI and IoT

"The Internet of Things and a multitude of networked machines mean that more and more data is available. However, this data is worthless if it cannot be used in decision-making processes. They must therefore be processed and intelligently evaluated by AI applications as quickly as possible. Artificial intelligence can also draw comparisons with other processes, systems and their data and, by learning from experience, independently solve future tasks, avoid errors and optimize processes," explains Martin Heinz, CEO of iTAC Software AG, a provider of MES/MOM solutions.

The IoT structure therefore needs Artificial Intelligence, which in turn needs the Internet of Things as a source of data. iTAC also relies on this symbiosis and enables streaming and batch analytics on a central, scalable platform with out-of-the-box access to MOM data for predictable production. The iTAC.MOM.Suite takes advantage of the latest IIoT technology. The iTAC.IIoT.Edge software is a component of the MOM system (Manufacturing Operations Management System), but can also be used stand-alone, enabling significant improvements in manufacturing processes in a short time. It is able to combine IIoT data with MES data to form flat data structures and analyze this data in real time. In the process, the data packages can also be transferred to other analysis or ML/AI tools used by the customer and ML models created on other platforms can be integrated.

Predictive maintenance as a use case

"Machine learning and artificial intelligence-based applications in the analytics sector make more sophisticated and higher-quality analyses possible than conventional technologies and algorithms can. For example, artificial intelligence can find complex patterns in data, draw conclusions and use them to make predictions," explains Martin Heinz. By using iTAC's edge solution, numerous ML/AI use cases for advanced and digitized manufacturing can be expressed, for example in the area of prediction. The appropriate monitoring of machine and sensor data makes it possible, for example, to predict machine failures. Unplanned machine downtime can thus be reduced by up to 70 percent. Another use case is the reduction of test efforts. Most SMT lines with AOI struggle with a high rate of false calls. AI can be used to accurately differentiate between true defects and false calls. This reduces the need for manual inspection by operators by up to 60 percent, with associated time and costs. The result is higher throughput while supporting zero-defect production.

Source: iTAC Software AG (www.itacsoftware.com)

This article originally appeared on m-q.ch - https://www.m-q.ch/de/wie-die-fertigung-vom-artificial-intelligence-of-things-profitiert/