What is Digital Transformation and use cases for boring business?

What is Digital Transformation?

Is a process that company goes through to change and improve the way it operates and works with the help of digital tools and solutions but the digital part is not everything. This process affects operations, work processes, the way the business delivers value to its customers through its products or services. Digital Transformation empowers the company to adapt to the market changes, acquire new capabilities, improve efficiency, cut costs and unlock new revenue opportunities.

For businesses in the traditional economy it is very important to stay competitive in their industries and have the ability to scale in a smart way. So here are some use case where digital transformation can help these businesses operate more efficiently.

Data Entry Automation and Analytics

Businesses in the traditional economy or how are they called “boring businesses” can have a hard time working and entering large amounts of data from reports, systems, spreadsheets, documents and other sources especially if they are not well organised which ends up in hours of manual works that otherwise could be used for more important tasks. The worst is that in this case it is very hard to make sense of massive data amounts and understand how it can be used to make decisions, acquisitions and further investments in the business to grow which results in decisions made on assumptions and lost $$$

Developing and implementing digital tools tailored to the company’s specific case can help scan, clean, and break down massive amounts of data into more digestible and usable formats, creating templates and organising critical information to help in making important decisions.

Benefits:

• Lower operational costs

• Increased employee efficiency (more hours spent on activities with bigger impact for the company)

• Real-time insights on important metrics of the business

• Automated report generating in different formats

Improved Supply Management

A lot of businesses in the traditional economy like manufacturing, logistics, car washes, laundromats, hospitality, construction, home service businesses (cleaning, roofing, flooring, retail, property management) and companies that operate self storage facilities work with partners and vendors to fulfil their needs for equipment, raw materials for manufacturing, supplies or maintenance and often times the workflow is not streamlined, all the information and data is not centralised in one place, the communication still done on whatsapp or other chats were it is hard to track changes in order and even order status which usually ends in delayed order processing and product or service delivery for their end customers that results lower customer retention, lower rate of repeat orders and services and decreased ROI.

Implementing a back-office tool with a separate section for vendor and supplier management can streamline the work process, automate order processing or make changes in existing ones as well as track the progress for each request. Also integrating analytics features inside will allow the company to track relevant statistics for each vendor or supplier they work with, create procedures and also analyse statistics on costs and expenses for the suppliers.

Benefits:

• Improved relationships with vendors

• Improved expense tracking

• Real-time overview on orders and workflow with vendors.

• Centralised source for all documents, contracts, orders, request for all suppliers and vendors

• Real-time overview on statistics that can be used for better decision making and resource allocation resulting in optimised operational costs.

Compliance Automation

The companies in the traditional economy constantly need to be compliant with rules and regulations, generate reports and stay on track with changes and updates on regulations in their geography were they operate but also in other countries were they perform their business activities to ensure that they can continue to operate and trade. This is very important especially with companies that manufacture or trade physical goods or services because in each geography the rules of how they need to be traded or delivered can have different requirements.

Implementing a compliance automation tool can help companies set up automated notifications on changes and reminders for important reports as well as when new changes occur to immediately take action and adapt the business and processes to the new requirements.

Benefits:

• Automated reports and compliance management

• Reduced operational costs

• Staying compliant means no fines and additional loses for the business

• Improved reputation and brand recognition from customers and authorities

• For boring businesses that also look to work with governmental contracts having a track record of being compliant increases the chances of winning big governmental projects.

Order and inventory processing

Often times companies in the traditional economy have a hard time tracking their available inventory and processing orders. People still using spreadsheets which quickly become outdated and customers aren’t able to track real time their orders and at which stage it is and also the onboarding process of customers in many companies still done in a very manual way.

Implementing an automated system that tracks inventory and notifies when there are shortages of inventory or overstock. The system can also perform automated reports, offer real-time overview on orders and have the business intelligence features to analyse stats and compare the metrics for different periods of the month, year or past years. Keeping track on all this processes will help the team understand where are the bottlenecks and how can they handle a big number of orders. Also being able to offer a seamless onboarding process for customers will make them want to work again with the company because of the great customer experience and ease of working with them. Automated onboarding process also means automatically generated contracts for each specific case, automated pre-defined and structured forms that are sent to customers to fill in with the required information which can also be tracked by the company and automated notifications for the customer about their orders and at what stage they are.

Benefits:

• Increased visibility on operations

• Increased sales

• Improved stock management

• Automated reports

These aren’t all the use cases of digital transformation and many more we will discuss in other upcoming articles. The most important thing to remember is that in digital transformation people, processes and digital tools need to work together and it’s not just about technology but rather empowering your people with better capabilities and resources to offer a better customer experience.

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