The term ‘digital transformation’ describes the process of a company adopting digital technologies to transform its business processes. The goal is to work smarter not harder, with the end result providing more value to your end customer. It may feel easy to dismiss it as tech jargon, but it is actually the key to growth for modern businesses.
Adding new technologies to your business is not something you do randomly. They must be added strategically in order to improve on current business processes to provide a superior service to end users. Improvement is fundamental to successful digital transformation, so you must know what needs to be improved and identify technologies to make it happen.
The Phases of Digital Transformation
There are various phases of digital transformation and understanding them can help navigate towards results-oriented strategies that can bring about success in the long term.
1. The first phase is evaluating the current state of operations to identify areas for improvement.
2. Next, you encourage engagement between management and employees to be creative about experimenting and seeking new solutions.
3. Discoveries made in the previous phase can now be developed into clear objectives. It’s important to be specific.
4. Once those specific goals are outlined, the digital transformation strategy can be outlined. Teams and employees work together to achieve the goals.
5. This is the point where a dedicated digital transformation team should be deployed to implement the strategy and modify as needed. New systems and processes will be added to the business.
6. At this point, you are ready to align your business with the new processes and monitor its success. It’s important to stay on top of trends in technology to take advantage of progress as it arrives.
6 Ways Digital Transformation Can Boost Your Business
1. It can supercharge your marketing
One key area where digital transformation can supply a competitive edge is marketing. Specifically, digital marketing, though it can affect broader marketing strategy as well.
Digital transformation in the context of marketing relates to the pursuit of digital excellence by optimising digital channels. It involves the refinement of those channels to access deeper insights for improving the customer journey.
Here are some ways digital transformation can reinvent your marketing:
- Breaking the silos: you can have all systems from disparate digital channels working together, providing insights into the big picture instead of lots of smaller, siloed data streams.
- Digital channel refinement: you will assess the value of current marketing channels to question whether you are making full use of these resources. This will guide your refinement of those channels.
- The customer journey: customer experience is king and can give you a competitive edge. With advanced insights from CRM and ERP software, you can optimise the customer journey and implement tools to improve on weaknesses.
2. Improving the customer experience
As just stated, customer experience (CX) is fundamental to long-term growth. Many of the world’s leading companies have placed customers front and centre in their business model, delivering the best possible online experiences at every turn.
Advancements in technology have raised the bar for the digital customer experience and a focus on this element of business can be extremely beneficial for your revenue. Just look at how digital streaming has taken over from DVD renting – the streamlined customer experience makes it far more convenient, and streaming gradually replaced renting altogether.
3. Enhance the employee experience
It’s not just customers who benefit from the new experience of digital transformation. The employee experience is based on your employees’ perception of the workplace, and it has an impact on their engagement and productivity.
Employee experience is integral to every stage of the employee lifecycle, from recruitment through skills development and right through to rewards and recognition. Through digital transformation, you can analyse these things and try new initiatives.
Digital transformation can provide:
- Opportunities for flexible/remote working.
- Access to new communication platforms that improve collaboration and other things.
- Ability to find and utilise key data to get the job done.
Digital transformation can also provide automation to enable employees to eliminate tedious, repetitive tasks and focus on their core responsibilities.
4. Automation at every opportunity
Three of the top digital goals for technology companies today are:
- Migrate operations to the cloud.
- Automate business processes wherever possible.
- Modernise legacy systems.
Automation has always been a core goal of the digital age. It can provide cost reduction and performance improvements as well as business resilience and faster development/deployment cycles. The modern digital ecosystem is particularly complex and digital transformation can provide end-to-end automation to help exist within it.
Automation can take care of integration challenges, data silos and challenges with deployment. Modern automation systems are easy to implement and infuse with existing processes, enabling faster data processing and superior analysis of that data.
5. Real-time decision making
With big data and advanced analytics, your organisation will have unprecedented decision-making power. Modern enterprises handle enormous volumes of data and, with access to the right analytical tools, that raw data can be interpreted into valuable business insights in real time. This enables faster and more informed decision-making.
Artificial Intelligence has come about due to digital transformation and it lets you tap the well of big data. Advanced AI can sift through data many times faster than people can so you can measure performance and make decisions in real time.
6. Making business partnerships digital
The power of collaboration is more important than ever in the modern ecosystem. Businesses work with suppliers, contractors, distributors and consultants to provide the products and services they offer. To manage business partners, you need secure channels of communication, and digital transformation can provide this in various ways.
You will have the capability to build digital processes at an early stage that are infinitely scalable. These will be able to handle the various alliances and partnerships you develop as you grow. This way, your business can be ahead of the curve and have maximum availability for future opportunities as they arrive.
With digital transformation, you also have the resources and tools to improve the efficiency of your internal processes. This improves your ability to scale with the business and strengthen partnerships as you go.
Getting Your Digital Transformation Strategy Right
As you can see, digital transformation is extremely important for modern businesses. But, as stated early in this article, the key is that it must bring about improvement. Digital transformations will look different for every organisation, and it is crucial to identify the right changes to implement in order to make the improvements where they are needed.
It can be helpful to bring in expert assistance to facilitate a digital transformation. With a specialist consultancy at your disposal, the process can be optimised based on experience and expertise. This may improve the chances of getting the most out of your digital transformation. Of course, you can do it yourself if you have the resources to dedicate to it.
Just be sure to understand the importance of getting it right. Do your research, don’t skip any steps, and take the time to ensure you have identified the correct areas for improvement and found the best solutions for them. The world is digital, so your business cannot afford to not be.
Why choose Eventura for your ERP project?
Eventura have been helping businesses in their digital transformation journey for two decades. From the implementation of industry-leading ERP solutions such as Sage 200 and NetSuite, to helping them move their entire operations to the cloud and away from costly and restrictive on-premise solutions.
As well as being NetSuite Solution Providers, Sage 200 Partners and Microsoft Gold Partners, we also offer a wide range of managed IT services, meaning we can take your business as a whole and help it achieve digital transformation.
If you would like to speak to one of our experts, you can request a free call back here.
