In the constantly developing digital world, companies should understand the importance of technologies that must be adopted in order to keep up with the competition. Cloud-based services, big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technologies redefine the way business is done. Digital transformation is a unique opportunity for every business to gain a competitive edge and achieve scalability and progress. Continue reading to find out the benefits of digital transformation and how digital solutions can help your business keep pace with the competition.
Why is Digital Transformation Important?
Gartner reports that 91% of businesses are involved in a type of digital project, and nearly 87% of top executives consider digitalization as a crucial objective. So why is digital transformation important?
The competitive pressure on business is getting more intense which means that every company should consider introducing new strategies and approaches to provide both customers and partners with up-to-date effective solutions tailored to their needs. Global market trends show that it’s no longer enough to just be good at what you do as a company but it is crucial to introduce innovation and improvement to the services your company provides. Nevertheless, transformation should begin with the company’s internal workflows and operations, and this will ultimately drive the overall business’s growth.
Commonly-Used Digital Transformation Technologies
The current digital world offers a great variety of technologies and solutions that add value to the company’s services. Each solution is selected in accordance with the business challenges and goals and is included in the overall digital transformation strategy.
- Big Data
- Cloud Computing
- Machine Learning
- Internet of things (IoT)
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Cyber Security
- AR and VR
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
What Are the Benefits of Digital Transformation?
A proper combination of these digital solutions results in a greater pool of benefits. As a result, companies that adopt digital transformation gain value from digital innovation at all levels.
Cost and Time Spent Reduction
Gartner claims that around 70% of digital transformations initially focus on cost-related goals, making expense reduction the most common place to start. Digital transformation is often used by companies to make most of their current assets, boost employee productivity, lower overheads and production costs.
Enhanced Staff Productivity
A business’ greatest asset is its personnel. Therefore, one should continuously invest in the working conditions to increase employees’ quality of life. With the help of a proper tech stack coupled with efficient workflows, you can drastically boost team productivity. It allows team members to operate with greater output by automating numerous manual and repetitive processes and better organizing data across the entire company.
Increase Customers’ Satisfaction Rate
One thing that any customer will like is a personalized approach from your business. That said, they are not always keen on live interactions with real people if they want to do something like updating, reactivating or deactivating their software. They tend to expect all of the above to either happen automatically, or at least without needing to get on a call with tech support.
Applying such powerful digital tools as smart license modifications, is one of the most prominent advantages of corporate digital transformation. What usually comes at the end of these digitized processes is increased customer satisfaction and retention rates.
Reduction in Risks and Human Errors
Performing a digital transformation provides a massive boost to preventing errors. With many processes automated, a business gets rid of the human error factor and time-consuming data entry operations otherwise done manually. Digital processes are naturally more efficient and risk-free than any operations that need a living person at its helm.
Continuous Business Scalability
Corporate growth initiatives often mean development of a new product, which may have the potential to elevate the company to new heights. Thus, one more objective of digital transformation is to find new, long-term income sources for the business, not just small upgrades to already existing products and processes.
Better Product and Service Quality
Regardless of the industry, product and service quality is what differentiates companies in the eyes of customers, investors or stakeholders. Through the implementation of new strategies and modern, powerful technology, businesses can get rid of product deficiencies as well as tweak the ways they go about quality control.
Shorter Time-to-Market
Decreasing time-to-market is another benefit of implementing digital tools and agile methodology. More and more often companies deploy collaborative solutions that enable flexible and rapid product development. For example, software like Onshape and Arena uses cloud-native architecture to simplify user access, get rid of bottlenecks faster, and streamline communication.
Improved Sustainability
If a company strives to build a more sustainable future for the planet, digital tools are absolutely necessary. Naturally, product design and engineering decisions massively affect the carbon footprints of later production, use, servicing, and disposal methods. So with the help of digital technologies like IoT, CAD, PLM, and many kinds of simulations, manufacturers can get a better overview of existing materials, processes, and logistics – and improve them. If done right, this usually leads to less waste generated across the whole lifecycle of the product.
Optimized Data
Optimized data leads to better decision-making since it gets more complete, accurate, and contextual. Using digital transformation, companies can utilize the potential of big data and advanced analytics to make their services and products better. For instance, technologies like IoT provide real-time insights with regards to product performance. By using this information, companies target product deficiencies and get deep insights into how customers use the product to improve subsequent iterations of the product.
Better Team Communication and Collaboration
Businesses tend to get more collaborative, responsive and adaptable by creating continuity in everything across the company, often through digital means. And not just the company usually gains from improved collaboration – in the end, so do the customers.
Using cloud-based solutions to facilitate more frequent and flexible communication is one strategy to enhance cooperation. SaaS solutions offer real-time collaboration, lower friction across departments, and are also easy to use for remote employees.
Company Flexibility
Businesses can also embrace Continuous Improvement (CI) practices and increase their flexibility with the help of digitalization. Digital business environment will enable your company to predict challenges and suggest possible solutions in due time so that the stable future for your business is ensured.
The list of benefits is endless and varies from one industry to another. But changes that deliver these competitive advantages should take place at all business levels from CRM and service management to data security to ensure a successful digital transformation process.
What Industries Can Adopt Digital Transformation?
Transformation works for various industries and can significantly improve business performance. Since every industry is different, it’s important to carefully look at its main goals and challenges.
For example, the healthcare industry can significantly reduce operational costs by automating repetitive tasks that are currently performed manually. As a result, clinics and other medical organizations can spend saved money on additional research, as well as upgrading old equipment or buying new. Besides, medical specialists will be able to spend more time treating patients. From the patients’ perspective, telehealth solutions allow them to make online appointments with a doctor, send and receive their data to discover diagnoses and recommended treatment. All of these solutions significantly increase customers’ satisfaction rate and reinvent the current healthcare model.
Transportation and logistics are other areas where digital transformation can bring a significant improvement to businesses’ performance and revenues. Most of the operations from order placing to the delivery tracking can be automated which results in cost reductions and increases the speed of delivery. A fully digitized supply chain model is a must for modern transportation companies aspiring to keep their performance at the top of the industry’s demand.
Banking and finance are key industries that depend significantly on the digital world. By 2020, transactions of more than $4,700,000m US dollars in value have been performed digitally worldwide. This means that modern financial enterprises should provide clients with the opportunity to make digital payments anytime and anywhere in the world to cover customers’ needs. Also, digital transformation in banking and finance is not just providing customers with an opportunity to make transactions online-it allows streamlining customer relations management, analyzing client data at scale and making better informed decisions and smart forecasts, ensuring sensitive data is secure and so much more. Most tasks can be automated, which helps companies to reduce risks and human errors. Automation frees up the employees, allowing them to perform tasks that require their undivided attention.
The above-mentioned solutions can be applied to any other industry including IT, retail and manufacturing, telecommunications, marketing, etc. Contact OMI experts now to learn more about possible solutions tailored to your industry.
4 Crucial Steps to Make Transformation a Success
When it comes to changing any part of an established system, it’s important to pay attention to each element of the transformation from strategy planning to its implementation. These four key points will help to double-check what is needed to reach better end results.
1. Strategy comes first
Digital strategy planning is the first step on the way to transformation. Normally, strategy development includes the following steps:
- Evaluating current KPIs and challenges;
- Establishing strategic goals and needs;
- Defining initiatives and technologies needed to reach strategic goals;
- Evaluating costs and time needed for transformation.
A properly developed strategy ensures the future success of the transformation and a better understanding of what the company needs in order to improve its performance and address existing challenges.
2. Connecting old and new technologies
Legacy modernization helps to make sure your systems work perfectly together with no issues, during and after the transformation process. When new technologies are implemented, it’s important to connect them with the existing platforms to ensure proper data exchange. Since there are some systems that are hard and costly to replace, modernization is a great option to unlock big data opportunities, reduce errors, and improve reliability with less cost and time spent. Cloud-based solutions, as well as integration with the existing software, can change the way you do business.
3. Establishing a new digital infrastructure
Any digital infrastructure consists of many layers. For every case, it is designed individually and should combine various business models and technologies that solve every problem defined during planning the strategy. New digital infrastructure helps to leverage existing capabilities and uncover new opportunities for future business scalability. In order to establish a stable and effective digital infrastructure, make sure your company’s goals and challenges are properly evaluated. The elements of the new digital infrastructure should include solutions to every issue covered in your transformation plan.
4. Operate everything digitally
Every company’s performance depends on how they handle day-to-day operations and tasks. With the help of automation, key business processes can be delegated to machines and AI. As a result, experienced staff can pay more attention to the operations that require extra human judgment and expertise rather than waste their time on repetitive tasks. Analytics, accounting, document and data processing and hundreds of other tasks will be delivered by technological solutions. This allows enterprises to cut costs and time spent, improve staff’s performance, and focus more on what really matters for future business success.
How We Approach Digital Transformation at OMI
With over 20 years of digital expertise, OMI specialists have delivered hundreds of transformation solutions for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 giants in various industries. Every case we’re working on is carefully evaluated in order to provide a perfect combination of technologies and initiatives needed to reach your business goals. When it comes to transformation, OMI aims to:
- Improve efficiency by providing comprehensive solutions based on a combination of the company’s needs, current infrastructure, and industry requirements.
- Foster better decision-making through insightful reports and data analysis delivered by the latest AI and Big Data technologies.
- Deliver greater profitability by boosting sales rates and cutting operational costs with the help of automation and transformation solutions.
- Ensure 100% transparency within the new digital-ready culture to increase employees’ trust and performance.
- Drive data-based insights to provide relevant and useful information for future business growth.
- Update skillsets & knowledge to make sure even non-technical users and employees can handle the new digital infrastructure.
Learn more about our digital transformation services now and talk to our experts!
CRM and Digital Transformation as an Ultimate Solution for Business by OMI
Customer relationship management helps enterprises to establish relationships with current and future clients to drive more sales and increase profitability. When it comes to combining CRM and digital transformation, new technologies, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics or Nimble, can open up more opportunities for future growth in the number of satisfied customers and revenues. So how exactly can CRM be improved with the transformation solutions?
Sales rates depend directly on how your company engages with customers. At the same time, customer engagement depends on how you gather, analyze, and use the client data. Tools and systems delivered with the digital transformation can automate these processes and increase their efficiency in several ways:
- Contact management systems allow structuring customers’ data in the most convenient way to make it easy to navigate for further engagement.
- Smart lead management helps to deliver only relevant information to future customers and gain more value.
- Marketing automation systems allow adjusting various campaigns in accordance with customers’ needs and help to reach clients more efficiently.
- Insightful reports and analytics gathered in real time allow your managers to track business performance and adjust key processes to deliver higher performance.
With the help of digital transformation, it is possible to design a fully customizable CRM platform that can be adjusted to the constantly changing business goals. Cold calling can be replaced with social sales, while offline marketing activities can be complemented and reinforced with online efforts. As a result of transformation activities within the CRM approach, enterprises will leverage the following benefits:
- Increased customer and staff satisfaction rates;
- Decrease in operational and marketing costs;
- Improved performance and increase in revenues;
- Enhanced data and reporting.
Still in Doubt about Whether to Digitally Transform?
If you are still not sure if transformation can help your business to grow and evolve, contact OMI experts to get the answers. Our specialists will be glad to lead you through the benefits of digital transformation and design comprehensive solutions to help you reach your business goals.