How businesses can benefit from digital transformation?

Based on the outcome of multiple pieces of research conducted over past years, only those buyers fully utilize the products which can understand the need and benefits of the purchase, wherein the purchase was not made due to peer or social pressure. This holds for the digital transformation as well. Business owners will be able to take maximum advantage of the solution only when they can understand what they will reap from the end solution.

There are immense benefits of digital transformation, but we will dig into three (3) core areas of any business and how digital transformation will assist them:

1. Financial Growth & Accounting
2. Process Improvement
3. Risk and Issue Management

Now, let’s jump into each one of them and discuss them in brief!

1. Financial Growth & Accounting

It is the core of any business. If we consider business as a vehicle then finance is the fuel. The mileage of this vehicle depends upon how efficiently this fuel is used. In addition, the growth of businesses is directly dependent upon year-to-year financial growth. That means the fuel tank of the vehicle needs to keep expanding.

How can digitization help businesses achieve that:

a) Can help you reduce cost

When a business performs steps needed to go digital, they examine all the processes they currently follow in their business. To ensure that the processes are streamlined, they may get rid of redundant workflows and various tedious and time-consuming processes. In turn, this helps reduce the cost by many folds.

b) Can help you achieve growth

When the processes are digitized, many people in the workforce could now cater to more customers. In addition to this, all this will happen without team burn-outs, missed opportunities, or dissatisfied clients.

c) Can help you invoice better

One of the key processes that must get digitized during the digital transformation exercise is issuing of invoices. Once a business automates accounting, it ensures that no bills get missed. Further, a threshold of credit limits could be set to highlight the risk of various customer accounts, like online transaction records, vendor management, pending credits and payment schedules. This all gets automated.

d) Superior future projections

When you digitize, data becomes a crucial commodity, which can be used to learn valuable information related to your customer’s buying habits, your inventory, and stock level and where the business is generally headed. With this collected data, a mixture of computerization and your experience, many future projections could be automated that will help in determining and setting future financial goals.

2. Process Improvement

Every business has its unique way of functional processes. For achieving an outcome, the businesses set up different levels of approvals and workflow management. As the business grows, they become more hectic, complicated, and overload the complete process itself.

Sometimes these complicated processes become the primary reason for the failure of the business. Determining the bottlenecks in the process on a timely basis and digitizing them can increase the efficiency and efficacy of the business.

Let us consider the above example of a vehicle; the processes act as an engine. The more efficient the engine, the more effectively the vehicle runs.

Below are a few of the process improvements which digitization can help accomplish.

a) Effective approval management

The complete workflow and approvals among different departments and stakeholders could be digitized and automated, giving businesses a full view of how the process is being followed and thus more effective.

b) Streamlining Communication

All communication between different departments can be streamlined and thus improve the way information flows in the organization.

c) Tasks, milestones, and delivery plans

Digitization can help planning the tasks, milestones, and delivery plans for the upcoming weeks and months. Different barriers too can be identified in advance, and an action plan can be in place to manage various risks.

d) Digitize the way you manage your inventory

Using digitization can help automate inventory management in your business. Multiple alerts and thresholds could be set, helping in proactive determining the shortages and vendor orders.

e) Implementation of new digital sales and marketing strategy

Digitization can be applied to implement and improve various marketing campaigns run by the business. These need to be effectively planned and automated using emails, messages and other social media platforms to keep the customers engaged and generating new potential leads. These new leads can be added to your sales funnel and take through the impressive sales journey.

f) Digitization of lead management and CRM processes

Digitization also helps in the implementation of lead management and customer relationship management (CRM) processes. One can even integrate their existing solutions to make them swift and easy to use by the sales team in the business.

3. Risk and Issue Management

Most businesses are not capable of addressing the elephants in the room at the right time, which leads to financial losses and even complete business failures. One can easily mitigate if there are robust processes to get the correct information made available to the decision-makers at the right time.

Again, looking back at the example of the vehicle, risk analysis and mitigation are like suspensions and brakes; ensuring the smooth running of any vehicle and the comfort of the driver. Below are a few ways in which digitization helps you achieve improved risk and issue management:

a) Improved reports

A robust system will allow you to generate various reports in an automated way. These reports can allow you to understand and highlight different risk areas of the system. Using these reports variety of thresholds and alarms can be planned and implemented to manage the risks.

b) Effective escalation management

Based on the risks identified, levels of escalations are to be implemented. These can be triggered on a need basis or automated per different business rules.

c) Informational dashboards

Different departments and teams need access to various information at their fingertips to run the business effectively. A robust system will allow you to create a diverse management dashboard that can further be used by different teams to plan their actions accordingly.

d) Stakeholder’s notifications

Stakeholders who will get affected could be informed proactively and in a timely and effective manner.

We have highlighted and briefly discussed just the top few benefits that businesses will achieve through digital transformation.

If you feel that you have realized that this is something you’d need help with and are looking for someone who can help achieve the desired benefits at competitive pricing, Iotasol is where your hunt ends.

Contact us now and we’ll guide a smooth transition of your business going digital.

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