Losing business because you lacked the technology to engage with customers anytime through their preferred method is a great motivator to fix the problem. If you still operate in a 9-5 world with no mobile app, chatbot, or digital channel that gives your customers access to communicate with you 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year, chances are you’re losing sales from consumers who expect companies they support to be accessible on their time.
Unfortunately, by the time your tech falls short of serving customers directly, you’ve likely reached the point where it’s time to rethink your entire approach to your business systems. If you’ve only made the minimal investment in new technology over the past decade, you’re probably missing out on advancements that carry a significant positive impact for your business.
Despite many companies undergoing their digital transformation, 70% of organizations go about it the wrong way despite the cost and effort. With your digital journey on the horizon, you may be wondering how some digital transformations flourish while others miss the mark? Of the $1.18 trillion spent on SMB digital transformations last year, an estimated $900 billion could have been used more effectively.
What is digital transformation?
When your organization is considering becoming a digital enterprise, then you’re truly ready for ‘out with the old, in with the new.’ Whether or not the terminology speaks to you, your digital transformation is about more than a cliche catchphrase. Instead, your path to becoming a digital enterprise is ultimately about a fundamental rethinking of how the company chooses to use technology, processes, and people to evolve its business performance.
There are many goals to becoming a digital enterprise… to increase internal collaborations, improve service, optimize processes and increase efficiency make up a few. In the end, your digital transformation’s primary objectives include:
- Improving the speed at which you do business
- Bringing down the costs of doing business
- Gaining a competitive advantage
Becoming a digital enterprise is not just an evolutionary change, it is a revolutionary change that affects every facet of the organization. Although typically led by the CEO, this all-encompassing evolution requires cross-departmental collaboration and shifts in current business philosophies adopted by everyone in the entire organization.
Your digital enterprise journey doesn’t occur overnight and doesn’t come in a box. The CEO cannot delegate it, nor should it be implemented without fundamental shifts in people, processes, and technologies.
Here we outline how companies who have successfully achieved their transformation became effective digital enterprises using a framework of six foundational tactics that follow:
- Developing strategies for innovation
- Understanding the buyer’s journey
- Implementing process automation
- Assembling a diverse team
- Data and analytics for better everything
- Technology that drives it all
Developing strategies for innovation
Growing companies define their successful digital transformation through their ability to reinvent themselves without fear of disrupting existing business models with new ways of doing business. These companies focus on projected value driven by experimentation. For your transformation, you’ll use your digital advantage to compete in existing markets while potentially disrupting your current processes to redefine how you’ll compete through better prices, excellent customer experiences, or superior product offering.
Understanding the buyer’s journey
When becoming a digital enterprise, successful companies uncover and understand how and why their customers make decisions. You’ll need to review, rethink, and reimagine the customer’s journey, which has become a digital journey more often than not. You’ll need to expand your idea and definition of the consumer path to purchase and determine how you’ll use digital channels to engage with your target audience where they exist now to find out how to effectively connect with them in the future.
Implementing process automation
Becoming a digital enterprise allows you to use process automation to reinvent processes and customer journeys through automation and agile methodologies. Now you can reimagine how your workforce delivers by focusing on value-added tasks that require human intelligence while technology handles repetitive tasks through artificial intelligence and other emerging tech.
Assembling a diverse team
Building a high-performance digital team is at the heart of every successful transformation. A team with varied backgrounds will help keep perspective and a learn-as-you-go approach. After all, experts can teach digital strategy, but the experience is invaluable. When the conditions, business goals, and objectives can change, it helps to have a team comfortable with changing circumstances. Your challenge is to develop a team and plan that is agile, flexible, and collaborative.
Data and analytics for better everything
With the new technology developments, data and analytics have paved new paths for growth. Real-time monitoring and visualization are fundamentally changing the relationship between businesses and their customers. A McKinsey report that surveyed 400 international companies found that organizations who make extensive use of customer analytics see a 126 percent profit improvement and are 186 percent more likely to have above-average sales growth over their competitors. Collecting data is beneficial, of course, but it’s what you do with it that matters. As a successful digital enterprise, you’ll be able to quickly access and analyze data to make informed business decisions by using metrics and insights to grow.
Technology that drives it all
Becoming a digital enterprise goes well beyond developing an innovative website or app. Instead, your digital transformation allows you to innovate and increase efficiencies. What technology touches every aspect of your organization and how your employees, customers, suppliers and stakeholders experience your company more than your enterprise resource planning? Your ERP delivers full visibility and powerful data analytics to customize and increase your competitive edge, improve performance, and integrate your business process from a single source of truth. A cloud-based ERP lets you access, process, and secure massive amounts of data through a scalable, cost-effective solution.
If you’re on your way to building a digital enterprise, it starts with your business technology. A modern, robust, cloud ERP system provides the foundation to optimize and maximize your digital journey by helping you develop strategies for innovation, understanding the buyer’s journey, implementing process automation, assembling diverse teams and data analytics for better everything.
ERP selection is an important decision for any business, so it’s vital to implement the right ERP system. Which cloud ERP solution will replace your outdated on-premise legacy solution?
