Fortune favors the brave. Over the last few months, businesses have needed to venture bravely into a ‘new normal’. While this transition has been more natural for the companies who already had a strong digital strategy in place, it has been a challenge for those in the earlier stages of digital transformation.
The key is not to get too discouraged or lose hope altogether. Instead, now is the time to acknowledge where you are in the digital transformation process. Decide where you are going and what you want to achieve, then gradually work towards it.
Reinventing the wheel to survive the race
It has been interesting to see how mid-sized businesses have begun to reinvent themselves as pandemic-related regulatory changes have brought a halt to business-as-usual. All businesses have had to re-look both their customer and workforce journeys, re-mapping them to comply with regulatory requirements.
Many of our manufacturing clients have had to implement interventions, including regular testing and isolation, where necessary, of employees. Workspaces need modification to ensure limited interaction; high-frequency cleaning of high touch surfaces has also impacted the planning of shifts. Improvement of filtration and ventilation systems and the use of personal protective equipment has become mandatory, amongst other initiatives.
This new normal has affected all spheres of the business. We’ve seen changes in the delivery process, for example, where strict sterilization efforts are in place from the time the goods leave the supplier to when they are delivered to the customer. Now customers no longer need to sign for goods received, which would have been a deal-breaker in the past, all to ensure compliance with necessary safety protocols.
The need to adapt
Across the world automotive manufacturers have pivoted to produce ventilators instead of car parts, luxury brands are producing sanitizers instead of perfume. These changes to the production lines have helped to answer the increased demand for personal protective equipment and at the same time have helped to keep the businesses afloat during these uncertain times.
Staff training still needs to continue. Businesses are learning to adjust from onsite, face-to-face training to remote training sessions through platforms like Zoom or MS Teams meetings. This in itself has also been a learning curve for many. How do you test those being trained if you did not have online testing in place, to begin with?
A transition to hybrid cloud and cyber-security
I think it’s become clear just how important it is to have a defined overview of all operational areas of your business and to have interoperable systems in place that allow for seamless integration. The ability to scale up and down quickly to respond to any major events such as Black Friday, other seasonal sales, or pandemics that force everyone indoors, is essential.
Our consulting team is working with several clients who are looking to make the transition to the cloud. Several businesses are seeing the value in adopting hybrid cloud strategies as they will be able to move specific applications that require scalability and high availability to the cloud, enabling them to respond rapidly when demand increases.
Another critical operational area in which we’ve seen an increased requirement is cyber-security. Businesses worldwide have had to enable entire workforces to work remotely, which places critical information at risk over unsecured connections. Cloud enables them to ensure that they have the flexibility to scale, to facilitate remote working, and to take advantage of the additional levels of security that accompanies the move to the cloud.
A renewed interest in digital technologies
It is not just manufacturing clients who are having to adapt. Retailers, whose sales were previously predominantly through brick-and-mortar stores, have had to make changes too, creating a stronger online presence and implementing online stores. Some have made the transition more successfully than others, but it is a good start, and we all realize that adapting to this new normal is a learning process for everyone.
Companies that in the past might have manually captured 100 orders a month via their websites have had to act quickly, increasing their online store capabilities. They have to ensure that orders can now be captured automatically on their systems as volumes have increased, sometimes as much as one-hundred-fold, and more staff have had to be hired to assist with the picking and packing to ensure that goods are ready for collection or delivery.
By having a clear view across the business these organizations were able to see the potential hazards, assess what they could and could not manage, and respond by scaling up to manage customer expectations and thus saving the customer experience.
Moving proactively forward
You do not have to panic if you did not have a very specific digital readiness plan in place previously. An important starting point is to gain an understanding of your organization’s digital maturity. Without this key insight, you need to be cautious about rushing to roll out a digital strategy – while your IT department might be digital-ready, your users might not yet be digitally mature enough to handle the transition, and the disruption which digitalization could cause, may impede progress, or make your users unproductive.
Now is the time to identify what some of the pressing needs are for your business, assessing whether you have a foundation on which you can build. If you will be starting from a zero position you can begin by putting a digital transition plan together, and then start gaining momentum.
You can also take a rather conservative approach and analyze what’s going to be best for your business. Ask yourself what digitalization would allow your business to do? Decide what the best outcomes would be for your business and identify some of the pressing challenges that you’re experiencing now, and how you can address those challenges.
Implementing an industry-built ERP solution with multiple deployment options, whether on-premises or in the cloud, can help you deliver specific functionality that enables you to adapt to your unique, and particular business requirements. It can aid in optimizing, and simplifying your operations, helping you to stay current and in control, and has the agility and scalability to adapt to your needs, simply and cost-effectively. Speak to your current vendor, or with multiple vendors if you don’t already have one.
