The business of company M in manufacturing industry involves daily maintenance of engineering equipment at sites . Thus , the primary goal of its transformations in the pandemic period is to ensure operations continue through remote solutions . First , it has implemented AR to safeguard the virtual presence of safety engineers at its maintenance sites all over the globe . The concept of AR was not new to the company before the pandemic , but the company only had limited experience . Since the start of the pandemic , the company has prioritized the roll - out of this technology and scaled up the adoption throughout the company . Second , WFH has been adopted , however , at the cost of efficiency , as IT equipment in manufacturing industry requires specific adjustments to allow remote access and such adjustments are usually not optimal . For example , before the pandemic , most software in company M would only be used on local networks for security reasons and employees manually connect local databases to enterprise resource planning ( ERP ) systems . In the pandemic period , such a manual connection was impossible as engineers could not go to sites to get the offline data . Thus , the company has developed an interface which connects ERP to a part of its offline databases . Due to partial database availability , several standard business procedures of the company have been delayed . Third , the company has adopted IoT at its production sites , that is to collect critical production data and use cloud analytics to turn this data into valuable insights about the efficiency of the operations . It is worth mentioning that the adoption of IoT has already been underway for 2 years in the company , and the pandemic has just accelerated the roll - out of this technology . Fourth , using data on the state of its equipment , the company has adopted ML to find patterns that help predict and ultimately prevent equipment failures .