The pandemic has triggered an exodus of companies to the digital. Its impact on businesses has been on these four crucial fronts:

• Rapid and continual change in customer behavior and needs

• Demand unpredictability

• Erosion of old channels of service and product delivery

• Remote workforce

Antonio Grasso, a celebrated global DX influencer, founder & CEO of Digital Business Innovation Srl, in a detailed interview with Techment Technology shared his thoughts around the digital. Here are the excerpts from the interview:

"To many, going digital is more about technology; to others, it is a novel way of reaching out to customers, and for many others, it is an entirely new way of doing business. Though all of these are correct ways of expressing the digital, such divergent perspectives are bound to create misguided endeavors and inchoate visions that will eventually lead to lackluster performances and unnecessary complications.

Antonio sees the digital as a powerful tool that must be used collaboratively. Institutions across the world must share digital capabilities and assets such as data to fight the common evils such as the pandemic and climate change.

• Revisit Digital’s Economic Impact
  Contrary to common aspirations to use digital for economic advantage, the digital will unbundle your product, allowing customers to pick what they need. Intermediaries would become obsolete, and consumer choices become limitless with price transparency. Digital always shifts an ill-proportionately large value to customers and you have to reassess your value proposition as it is a different ball game altogether.

• Redefine Your DX Goal
  Research reveals that the top benefits of DX are improved operational efficiency, faster time to market, and better customer experience (CX). Should you focus on digitization of core operations or go for digital innovation, understanding your digital maturity and your industry will help. You may want to go for both, but keep your priorities straight and avoid a siloed approach.

• Choose Clear Objectives with Unwavering Focus
  New or current business model? CX or cost efficiency? Enhancing innovation or productivity?

Your vision lays down the path for your new team with new skills.
In 2018, there were about 500,000³ unfilled tech jobs in the USA, highlighting the fact that companies can not hire and get what they want. Upskilling has become highly crucial in the digital age.

One McKinsey survey finds that only 16% feel that the DX resulted in improved performance with long term sustainability. What’s more, only 3 percent report complete success at sustaining their change.
Of the 70% transformations that fail, the dominant reason is employee resistance.

In the unchartered waters of global chaos, uncertainty runs rife. A prudent digital strategy is one powerful tool that can help SMEs find an anchor to navigate turbulence.

Safir Adeni, Chair, Forbes Business Council Dallas, and world’s leading DX expert, in an interview with Techment Technology, spoke on the most significant pillar of DX, the digital strategy. Here are the excerpts from the interview.

“Given their limited budget and resources, SMEs must focus on augmenting Customer Experience (CX) as it culminates in higher customer loyalty, retention, better Net Promoter scores, and profitability as customers are willing to pay more for the “WOW” experience.”

On the question of technology strategy, SMEs must incorporate digital technologies that help them gain insights into the “what” and “how” of customer experience, as well as, those that enable cutting-edge CX.

Incorporation of advanced technologies like RPA, NLP, AI, ML, blockchain won’t just improve the cost-efficiency of an SME, they prove instrumental in creating a competitive advantage by improving the CX, resulting in seamless market scalability and enhanced profitability. SMEs must explore affordable ways to experiment with these technologies.

On the issue of data strategy, SMEs must focus on limited data, out of which they can draw meaningful insights. They must focus on the quality of data vis-a-vis quantity as bad data, especially for SMEs, would only breed mistrust in data.

Bold strategies for digital transformation are significantly more successful. The reason may lie in the fact that bold strategies result in leapfrog technology advancements, and strong market differentiation.

Today, the Avalanche of change is seen more often, and to succeed at every disruptive turn, organizations need to transform their business. Each successful transformation, though unique in itself, has lessons for many. These lessons can guide companies in their DX journey.

Isabel Velarde, Founder & CEO, of Innovation Hub Consulting^®, who works with innovative companies, spoke to Techment on the best practices she has observed in successfully digital and innovative companies. Here are the excerpts from the interview.

“Business transformation involves an articulated series of changes, but the first step is to recognize the need for change. Successful transformations are guided by a comprehensive framework that encompasses reengineering in business processes, adoption of new technologies, a change in the corporate culture, and the incorporation of a change management strategy.

Data is the blood of modern era organizations. Organizations such as SMEs must develop the requisite infrastructure and processes to handle the data, filter, and store it.
Planning and installation for adequate infrastructure to record, store, and transfer data, as well as training the support staff, are essential for smooth functioning.

Amit Chatterjee, the Industrial IoT Segment Leader and Strategic Business Development, Intel Corporation, shared his insights and recommendations with Techment Technology. Here are the interview excerpts:

On account of scarce resources, tech investments have to be very prudent. For many SMEs, proper digitization of processes would be a challenge as it comes with infrastructure cost, support staff expenditure, maintenance, and other costs. Though the cumulative cost of the system, the cost connectivity, IT team, security, and surveillance prove to be financially heavy, they have to make allowances as digitization to survive. Today, even small enterprises without an IT team need to focus on digitization; they can address the challenge by training their team to manage the IT systems.

For SMEs, the value gain from digitization is immense because it allows them to monitor and control their processes at the micro-level, and improvement comes only after the ability to record and measure.

Initial success for SMEs would be to ensure traceability and visibility of their products and processes; it is the first step to efficiency improvements. Automated ticketing systems can help them monitor without errors and at lower costs.

Second, the quality benefits are also significant, as better control and production data can help companies get quality certificates to become certified suppliers to big brands. Digital helps in monitoring failure rates that help in inventory management at daily, weekly and monthly levels.

Third, lot rejection cost due to inspection is very high. Thus quality control enabled with digitization is a lifesaver. IoT can help in many ways, even for small enterprises with inventory tracking, route management, predictive maintenance, and more.

One vital digitization step would be to incorporate enterprise-wide EPR and must be open to incorporating RPA, AI for easy scalability, and efficiency gains. For smaller companies, the cloud is the best solution, and based on data rate, they should decide between cloud and edge.

Nirupam Srivastava, Vice President - Strategy and AI, Hero Enterprise, spoke at length with Techment on the most significant issue of digitalization and how SMEs can use it to succeed in the digital age.

“SMEs being short on budget, team, and resources need to prioritize. Focus on leveraging digital for differentiation and competitive advantage might be the best bet as they cannot compete on cost for lack of scale. The greatest strength of an SME is its agility, and by digitalization, they have the opportunity to turn it into a competitive advantage.

Customer Experience is the most vital area they can make a difference.

Rajiv Ganju is the Sr. Vice President, Global Supply Chain at Luminous Power Technologies (P) Ltd. (part of schneider). He was the winner of the IDC Digital Transformer of the year award, 2017.

Rajiv has been intimately involved in the planning, execution, and leadership of Luminous’s massive digital transformation. He spoke at length with Techment Technology and shared the details of their amazing and highly successful transformation. Here is their story!

It is an axiom in the world of DX that lengthier transformations are highly likely to fail, and that makes the transformation of Luminous, an incredibly intriguing success story.

Their transformation is a perfect example of how clear vision, leadership, as well as meticulous planning, can result in a successful DX at scale. In an interview with Techment Technology, Rajiv Ganju spoke about their entire journey. Here are the excerpts from the interview:

Phase 3: 2021-Beyond

AI and IoT enabled Smart Factory
Mr. Ganju tells about their vision- At Luminous, our vision is to establish our leadership in the Industry 4.0 ecosystem. We are working towards the creation of a state-of-the-art smart factory.

Transformation’s Focus Areas:
“At luminous, we always focus on sustainability, and it comes only with cultural acceptance; culture is key. When the effort is as radical as digital adoption and transformation, cultural polarization is of cardinal importance.

To ensure a pro-change culture, we invested heavily in training and exposure. Our people got exposure to the best factories in the world and were inspired to bring home the new.

One of the vital elements of success is to ensure participation and democratization of the process of transformation. The team that was involved in spearheading the DX had representatives from every department; we made every voice count.

Also, a steady and gradual pace of transformation is more sustainable than leapfrogging. Piecemeal transformation helps ensure the sustainability of digital adoption, new processes as well as performance improvements.
Rajiv Ganju's recommendations to SMEs:

• Begin in-house efforts to improve and innovate. It will highlight the real need of the organization.

• Culture Must Lead Change. Our people received the exposure they needed in terms of possibilities, and we focused heavily on training to ensure upskilling.

• Incremental Change is sustainable and thus better. Plan for a transformation that runs in a planned manner with bite-size changes; keep the focus on sustainability.

• Be Cautious while selecting Automation: It is tempting to rope in high-end automation, but it is not sustainable because the company does not have the proper infrastructure to support it. Be ingenious, give preference to simplified and cheaper options that can last longer and can be maintained in house.

• Measurement Metric: Quality, Cost, Delivery, as well as Environment. Every change must usher-in positive developments in the areas of Quality, Cost, Delivery, as well as the environment. A digital change that props-up quality but slows down production and costs more might not be a move in the right direction. Sustainability is the real challenge of going digital. The only touchstone is the success on each front of Quality, Cost, Delivery, as well as, environment.

“The future of the Global Supply chain is SMART and Tailored supply chains that require SMART People, SMART process, and SMART Infrastructure. Moreover, companies have to be ready for flexibility and tailored supply chains to dream of ATMANIRBHAR (self reliant) Bharat.

To achieve it, Digitization is the cornerstone that will empower companies with predictive, prescriptive, and cognitive mechanisms that address real-time issues and be best in QCD (Quality, Cost, and Delivery).”

A digital transformation is about balancing diverse business and technology elements simultaneously. The process is fraught with numerous challenges for SMEs. Resource crunch, budgetary constraints, time shortages, talent scarcity, and cultural resistance often lead to complications. Experts suggest a piecemeal approach that allows for incremental and marginal transformations as the best way forward. Assessment of digital maturity and refinement of digital vision are the crucial initial steps. The key, they say, is neither to overinvest and nor to underinvest and map each digitization effort back to the business goal.

Shorter sprints with iterative outcome measurement can prop-up success rates by helping leaders and managers stay objective.

In the long run, companies must balance the dual digital imperatives, i.e., striking a balance between building new business models and digitizing or upgrading the legacy operations will help companies grow sustainably.

We hope that this guide contributes to your great migration, and we wish you success and welcome you to the digital age.