Digital transformation comes in many shapes and sizes. Depending on who your organization serves and what stage of the corporate lifecycle your company is in, you may already have digital-empowered teams around your company, or you might be starting fresh.
Businesses that embrace digital transformation tend to see a few common benefits emerge as they progress, regardless of industry:
Fast ROI: Every company wants a strong return on investment (ROI) for their corporate investments. According to the 2022 Revalize Insights Report, more than 80% of organizations that adopt a CPQ solution see positive ROI in 12 months or less
Reduced errors: Human error is a major hurdle for many businesses, especially in manufacturing. More than half of organizations that adopt a CPQ solution see a reduction in order errors by 50% or more, according to that same Insights Report.
Better customer experience: Finally, digital transformation can be a step that helps you better serve your customers, wherever they are. Today, customers expect a world-class experience … and they aren’t shy about taking their business elsewhere if interacting with your company is too cumbersome.
When it comes to embracing digital transformation in your manufacturing company, there are four main areas you’ll want to address to fully implement the idea. They are:
Empowering Your Employees – First, you’re going to want “digital buy-in” from your employees. You need to allow them to innovate as much as possible and this may be difficult if you have employees who feel hesitant to embrace technology. Instead of letting this hesitation foster, empower your employees to advance a step at a time, even if it is baby steps like moving over to a cloud-based format.
Engaging Your Customers – Use data and statistical analysis to better engage with your customers. By taking a “deep dive” into the data, you can track all your interactions with your customers so that you can expand on their experience and provide better customer support.
Optimizing Your Process – The third pillar, optimizing your processes, is one of the best areas that digital transformation can help with. By working through systems in the old, pre-digital manner, you probably have a lot of redundancies and areas where the time lag is so significant that it can impact your whole business. Digital transformation can streamline these processes so that your business runs optimally.
Transforming Your Product or Services – This is all about changing your core business to stay current with technology. If you’re used to delivering a catalog of products that rarely changes, then it’s absolutely necessary to modernize so you can stay current. Customization and other options are a must and new technology can help provide you with this.
Understand the CPQ market and decide which features are important for your company.
There are several challenges you must overcome to implement a digital transformation. These include:
Once you decide to leverage digital transformation to improve your business, it is time to settle on a strategy to get there. There are multiple steps to creating a digital transformation strategy that works for you.
Consider the following steps to help implement a strategy that is successful for your organization
Select the right partner: Digital transformation touches nearly every aspect of your business so choosing the right strategic partner for your project is key. At Revalize, we have helped more than 15,000 organizations succeed with the help of digital transformation.
Create a budget. Once you have buy-in, you need to look closely at your total budget and determine how much you’re willing to set aside for the digital transformation. This will be used on new equipment, software, and training.
Create a list of SMART goals and outcomes. Now that you know where you are, create your goals for making the transformation. Do you want to implement a new software system or a digitized process? Make sure that you list out all of the sub-points as steps you need to reach to get to these final outcomes.
Create your roadmap. Finally, you’ll want to make a map of exactly how you will achieve your transformation. This flowchart should include every step along the way as well as those employees who will be responsible for achieving these steps.
Get buy-in from your employees. It is critical to involve employees throughout your company early in the process to get them excited about the possibilities of this digital transformation. Educating your employees about the opportunities available is key.
Assess your current digital state. Next, do an analysis of where you stand with your digital readiness. Think of this like a road trip. You have to know where you’re starting from before you can figure out how to get where you want to go.
Figure out your weaknesses. Once you know where you want to go with your transformation, look back at your current state and determine where you have weaknesses and gaps. Is it that you have the software but are lacking in employee training? Then you need to know how to address this.
The company that refuses to modernize is making itself obsolete. In order to take the next step in the digital revolution, you need to embrace the concept of digital transformation. That means addressing the challenges so that you can overcome them and move your business forward
