Now is the time to hone your digital transformation strategy

Optimise your processes for thriving business continuity

So, where do you start? Plan and prioritise. Remember digital transformation is a journey, not a destination. You simply don’t have the time or resource to attempt to transform your entire organisation all in one go, nor has that route ever proved successful. Your emergency plan for remote working most likely focused on basic communications, collaborations and document access. You now need to turn to your most business-critical processes, like finance, legal and HR, for example.

Within your remote framework, how are you currently dealing with tasks like onboarding new employees or customers, reviewing contracts or handling payments? What devices do your team have access to for activating these processes? Your workforce needs to be able manage scanning and uploading documents to the cloud, as well as approvals and processing of critical documents, like invoices, contracts and so on, from wherever they are. So, look at your workflows and the technology you’re providing for enabling those workflows. Where can you digitise or automate part or all of these processes to make remote management easier? Where can you reduce manual admin and free up time for more rewarding, higher value tasks? Can you streamline current systems? Can you activate digital protocols, allowing you to both strengthen the security of your business information and give your team greater visibility of the data you hold for staying on top of compliance?

There’s a lot to consider here, but if you think about it from the perspective of your customer and employee experience at each touchpoint, you should be able to design something that works first time round. Simply, the optimisation of business processes and stakeholder experience need to go hand-in-hand. You need processes that are intuitive and adaptable in order to keep information flowing smoothly and your workforce happy and productive. You want to make it easy for your team to do their job in the most efficient and effective way possible. This means reducing the opportunity for human error and allowing greater focus on customer service.

Harnessing your data: the key to unlocking business growth

The benefits of optimising your processes don’t just end with productivity and efficiency. Once you really get to grips with managing your business-critical information, you’re no longer focusing on documents, you’re unlocking the opportunity of data. The introduction of cloud-based digital tools means that data can not only be stored, but also harnessed for business insight.

With greater insights and analytics about your business available, you have the ability to improve your ways of working on an ongoing basis, alongside making well-informed decisions about your strategic direction. You can begin to generate even deeper customer knowledge and be able to tailor your setup in line with their needs. Not only does this mean improvements in your business’s overall performance, you also now have the flexibility and scalability to quickly adapt to whatever the changeable future may bring.