Many businesses are being forced to accelerate their digital transformation due to the pandemic. Small and medium-sized businesses are realizing that digital transformation is a priority if they want to survive. The main driver that is pushing businesses to invest in the digital transformation is the customer. Customers want a seamless experience at their fingertips. Businesses that are reluctant to change are exposed to extinction. But developing and launching a mobile app is not enough nowadays.
1- What is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is much more complex and requires you to take a completely different approach to the business processes of your organization.
Business processes are the essence of a company; they drive the business and, assure that everything works towards creating products or services. Applying digital technology to your business processes is a step that can help you reach your goals faster and achieve much higher performance.
2- How is it done?
The first thing that comes to mind is automation. If your processes are not automated, there is nothing digital about them. Automation requires you to use certain software for handling your strategic, operational and support processes. Reducing the number of paper-based inputs, manual work, and human errors is an important part.
But automation is not the sole component of the digital transformation. Automating an existing business process without improving it, is useless. You need first to analyze the process; see how you can improve it by identifying bottlenecks and roadblocks. Improvement is an integral part of the digital transformation, so focus on optimizing your process and its components. To achieve that, you need to dedicate time to in-depth analysis, in order to understand the inputs, and outputs of a process. All the information needs to be examined before deciding which processes need to be automated.
Most of the time, businesses are approached by vendors who promise great success with systems and software that will reduce time, costs, staff... Although adding technology has great benefits on business success. It is crucial to have hands-on your business processes before and after integrating new systems. As an example, your employees need to know what to do in case of a system failure.
The key to successful technology integration into business processes is that it should add value. You need to improve your business process first and then integrate technology. It is important to frequently re-evaluate the automated process to take into account any changes that might occur.
When we worked on building the Shared Services Centre for one leading bank in the UAE, part of our job was to automate operations as loan services, credit cards, and cash and non-cash transactions. The economic effect was significant, because the services became more accessible to the customer, and the time that a customer waits for a service has been minimized as the execution time was reduced.
The benefits of digitizing your business are numerous such as the reduction of errors, time, and waste. We highly recommend to start adopting this approach as it will help you remain competitive and improve your customer satisfaction (internal & external).
We recommend that you hire an external consultant to help you as time will be required for modelling improving, re-engineering, implementing, and employee training.
We would be more than happy to talk to you about the different ways we can help you, feel free to set up a time to chat with me here.