Digitally Enabling your Business
The phrase digital transformation is thrown around a great deal these days and many organizations are certainly looking to do more with their technology estate as the current economic and market headwinds force companies to look for ways to innovate and become even more efficient.
If you believe your organization has too many manual processes that are error-prone, slow your ability to serve customers, and are zapping the life out of your key resources – digitally enabling your business might be for you.
So, where do you start and what types of things do you need to think about to ensure that you successfully orchestrate the right changes, create meaningful & visible impact, and provide a quick return on investment (ROI). Check out these simple steps designed to help you bring a digital mindset into your organization. Here are the steps:
Determine if the trip is worth taking. It’s an invaluable first step to deeply commit to focusing on what’s needed and making the journey to digitize your business a reality – refer to “A Digital Journey” for additional information.
Establish which 3 – 5 processes cause you or your customers the most pain. Then, state what your desired outcome is from digitizing processes and what your success criteria are – define what good should look like.
Choose one of those processes and ensure you know all the steps within the process. This includes understanding all the gazinta’s and goezata’s that are needed to successfully execute the process. Knowing the inputs and outputs of any process is vital and typically leads to uncovering other areas that need attention down the road.
Now look to streamline the process and remove any steps that may have been added over time, but are no longer relevant, necessary, or practical. We call this activity process fold-down.
Automate the process elements utilizing a no-code | low-code approach. This is typically facilitated using robotic process automation (RPA) tools such as UiPath. The software mimics the steps taken by a human and replicates them in software. If you have a developer you work with, they can typically come up to speed on RPA in only a few days and will be able to automate processes in hours versus days or weeks.
Test and validate the automated process works as desired. Once implemented, it is important that you measure the results. Are error rates down? Has the process cycle time been significantly reduced? Are people freed up to perform more productive work?
Rinse and repeat! Look for other areas where you can create truly sustainable results by leveraging automation and digitization.
In closing, by taking the approach prescribed above you will succeed in taking the necessary steps towards becoming digital-friendly. The approach we take is proven - start by performing the digital crawl, which sets you up perfectly to begin the digital walk, which will ultimately position you to run as a digital native.