Digital Transformation – a concept or a buzz word, is easy to hear everyday from some close associate or partner or consultant or integrated departmental managers. But as easy it sounds, the challenge many companies face is how to break the organizational brains towards a business-improvement common purpose. In order to achieve this, it must have an end-to-end vision, every area and process aligned to the corporate strategy. Then there a bunch of companies that adopted it early and got it right, as a result digital transformation gives them a competitive advantage by enabling to deliver products and services faster, with higher quality and lower costs. The more the processes in a business are digitised, the more beneficial the scenario as it gets.

Strategic Business Planning

It all starts with a diagnostic approach defining the markets, key addressees, products, the geographic locations with its constraints. This enables to build strategies to reach their objectives and defining an appropriate action plan specifying the necessary structure making them work in an organized, planned and customer-targeted way.

The Right Approach

Perform a nascent initial analysis
Create a strategic proposal
Outline the objectives, follow-up indicators and work plan.
Assemble the business case together with the company executives
Specify the objectives for the performance measurement of the executives
Constant follow up meetings, propose new ideas and evaluate the results through business indicators

Process
A proper diagnostic analyses of the core business processes, human capital and technologies forms a major foundation input work. Focusing on the pain points faced and the list of ongoing problems, the initial data is gathered survey as a group perspective and a value proposition is developed. The presence of informal processes is translated into inefficiency, re-processes and difficulty to meet all the business objectives. In order to face the challenge of optimizing them, understanding its impact, not only on its work area, but also on all the business by trying to reach a real digital transformation is very critical.

In the Function of:

a. Finance & Administration – Sales & Marketing

A complete review of internal processes, such as architecture of vendor payment, sales and collections and so on, synchronisation with the rest of the corporate processes. Generate a model that allows for the management a control on the critical variables, which will turn the accounting system coupled with Sales & Marketing into a real information system.

b. Purchase and Supplies – The Supply Chain system

As the present scenario is going through dramatic changes, companies are redesigning their business schemes where the supply chain is a major area of focus. Demand and supply factors are estimated with the forecasting analytics wherein, data on demand forecast is collected and used to plan manufacturing activities, such as resource planning, raw material procurement, and production execution. In an illustration scenario of “Forecast to Stock” it is successful only when

Finished products manufactured match the actual demand, with no backorders or ageing schedule. Minimum Inventory is stored yet making good customer demand.
Finished products are produced with expected quality on the first instance with minimal quality related scrap or rework.
No idle time- implying a full capacity operation for workforce and machines, least random downtime or any overtime.
Raw materials and semi-finished goods are available on time (from the concept of the famous Just in Time). No production and no materials sitting idle waiting for its input.

As globally having a Forecast to Stock more prevalent, Digital transformation can be effective in the following ways

Forecasting – As we know predicting future with even probable numbers consume intuition, understanding past and then some luck factor. As such estimate are not reliable everytime. That leaves one with predictive analytics. With the correct design and ample historical data, the specialized algorithms can predict market conditions with much more accuracy than a marketing analyst or a group of analysts juggling on spreadsheets.
Production & Planning – Digital transformation’s antics manages the right production from different production requirement with the constraints of limited resources to be shared across and within the product line to meet demand with same workers and machine.
Optimisation - digital planning software eliminate guesswork completely and can take the forecasts, generate, schedule, and prioritize production orders accordingly, taking into account planned maintenance, holidays, and other factors. Thus an optimized capacity utilization is generated deleting probable conflicts among production orders for shared resources. Whats more, it can even reorder raw materials on the basis of current stock levels and supplier lead times.
Process automation – Although many enterprises have automated production lines already, yet use of robotic process automation can be useful.
Supplies picking – Warehouse robots can take the bill of materials (BOM) for a production order, pick the listed items from their storage locations and placer them to the assembly line, verified and organized for use.
Process monitoring – With Industrial internet-of-things (IIoT) systems that have sensors that can monitor myriad aspects of the production process in real-time, can calculate and display key performance metrics on any device, from mobile phones to large-format monitors. Any alert pop up messages can be validated by some technical official and the problem if any can be corrected with minimal downtime and quality impact.
Quality monitoring – Automated robots supervise manufactured goods for quality issues, using deep-learning technologies empowering the system to inspect each unit and detect those with quality problems. Such collected data with the outcome can be analysed to further detect the cause to the lowest break down level taking it to the root cause.
Finishing and packaging – Decade ago most of the companies had error-prone process due to excess human intervention. In the present era, robots are much better suited although not every product can be finished and packaged using robotics, but the list is growing over time. In a production process with sophisticated and state of art implementation process a warehouse robot picks and delivers raw materials as well collects the finished products and organise them in the racking matrix to fulfil customer orders.

This was just an illustration to explain how every single element in a process can be revisited and transformed from the present scenario.

c. Business Intelligence

Focusing on empowering the decision makers and improving the performance of the organizations, a control board is administered for an efficient integration of data from different sources to generate useful and relevant information, which allows for faster decision making in different areas of the business.

d. Quality, Security and Environment

Organisations should be continuously developing and implementing their Quality Management System in order to incorporate Ongoing Improvement as an essential concept in all the processes and thus be prepared to achieve a certification that adds value to the core business process or in strategic areas.

e. Governance, Risk and Compliance

With changing times, especially post COVID-19 these terms are no longer a voluntary option for many organizations and are now a requirement to include within their strategy and internal structures in order to comply with the legal precepts, or to protect themselves from risky situations that could really jeopardize the stability and continuity of the organization activity.

People

We are in the era of human potential, which makes talent turn into the main source of company performance. It is no longer just linked to Human Resources, but it is aligned with the business strategy too. It is time to invest in identification, development and loyalty of talents to produce sustainable growth and accelerate the generation of value. The business strategies can only be executed successfully if they are accompanied by a talent strategy, as well as by the performance of their leaders, who transmit their values and motivation to the teams.

a. Selection

A right team demands a careful selection process based on the requirement of talent for its business process. The criteria has to be picked from the business strategy and goal for the required executive and redefine their structures, job position profiles, compensation policies, incentive programs, organization goals of the company and of each area with constant communication.

b. Training

In today’s environment where times are changing rapidly every aspect needs an update. Human Capital is vital for every automation or robot to function as planned. The same automation programmed for an outdated function can slowly lead to a horizontal line and eventually a declining trend. So keeping the human talent abreast with an updated skill and open to new knowledge will keep the business flexible enough to adapt to a rapid change in the ecosystem.

The Conclusion – Or beginning of a fast paced digital era.

Digital transformation can drive efficiency and productivity, enabling companies to do more with the same resources. Process and quality monitoring can provide real-time data about a production process and enable staff to nip problems in the bud.

Examples of digital transformations are many, to help everyone relate, who would have thought of a cab service provider without owning a single fleet of a machine to run a seamless global taxi service on the go. It’s a revolution challenging the way the service was provided to a completely new perception. It was much ahead of what most common businesses could imagine.

For businesses following the traditional way, there would be more surprises in the future. With the global backdrop of rising inflationary trends, shrinking margins, scalability could be one of the option to turnaround. Volumes can always be best managed with a Digital Transformation.

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