Large businesses and organizations are a complex collaboration of various operations such as purchasing, product development, manufacturing, logistics, and services, etc. The success of a company hugely relies on the efficient coordination between these departments. Combined with the tremendous amount of data that is generated at each step, it becomes a strenuous task for a company to manage everything efficiently while simultaneously providing exceptional services. This is where digital operations can assist companies. Digitizing can streamline and simplify the entire operations, improve coordination among departments and help organizations to analyze big data faster than before.
In recent years the pressures of involving digitalization in software and hardware industries have increased considerably. Furthermore, the coming of epidemic forced more companies to have perfect digital operations to provide services to customers. Mckinsey reported the exponential rise in customer’s digital interactions in the last year. Globally, in July 2020 the average of digital customer interactions rose to 58% from 36% in Dec 2019. Moreover, the rate of adoption is also at least 3 years ahead of what they were in past years.
What Is Digital Operations?
Simply put, it is the integration of digital technologies in various operations across an organization. Digitizing redefines how an organization works, in particular, through optimization of processes across the value chain and increasing productivity exponentially. It infuses agility, intelligence, and automation in processes to come out with operational models that are consumer-centric.
The Need For Digital Operations
As per a BCG survey, almost 80% of large-scale enterprises are going for digital transformations in one form or another. When implemented right, it can lead to a 10% to 20% cost reduction in supply chains, a 15% to 30% reduction in working capital, and revenue growth of almost 6%.
High-functioning digital ecosystems enable organizations to deliver a better experience to customers. There are many ways digital operations drive the growth of a company, some of them are listed below:
- It makes operations in a company agile enough to meet the market demands in real-time. With manual work, it was a tedious process to analyze the huge data and till the time it was done, the market would have shifted. With digitization, the data can be analyzed more quickly, and the process can be expanded or contracted as per requirements.
- With more and more people shifting to digital platforms, the success of a company now relies on its digital services. Technology enables a company to reach a huge number of customers. Some examples include.
- Product Simulation Tools
This helps in testing the new product designs more quickly as compared to physical testing. It saves on time as several of the manual process can now be replaced by automation henceforth improving efficiency as well as productivity.
- Predictive Analytics
This helps in reducing defects in the value chain and the costs of maintenance. It is a proactive model where problems are identified before they occur.
- Collaborative Robots
These are now added to assembly lines where it is difficult to accommodate conventional robots. This can help in manufacturing industries like computer hardware to improve production costs.
- Cloud Computing
This refers to managing, processing, storing, and analyzing data with the use of internet-based servers. This removes the need for physical devices to store the data as it gets stored in a cloud. This helps companies to better manage the data to improve efficiency as well as customer experience.
Digital operations lead to standardization in an organization. Following standards can be tedious for people working in a company; however, digitization can follow the same standards with higher efficiency.
Leadership role and governance in implementing digital operations
Leaders of organizations should be well trained to get the best out of digital operations. The success of digital transformation relies on the outlook of a company, and if leaders cannot ingrain this transformation in them, the digital operations will not be able to perform as expected. As per the Accenture report where they surveyed 600 companies from around the globe, only 13% of the companies had more than 50% of their leaders trained to use analytics to make decisions. One of the biggest challenges the companies face in adopting digital transformation is getting the workforce to accept new policies and technologies. When senior staff starts accepting the digital transformation, enthusiasm can be generated within the workforce to accept the involvement of new technologies.
The highest level of governance must drive the adoption of digital transformations in a company. The incorporation of digital systems brings fresh challenges to the organization like faster business cycles and firm-level integration. To understand those challenges new forms of governing bodies are required. As per interviews conducted by Capgemini, the organizations have adopted two types of committees to govern digital transformation namely, steering committees and innovation committees. The steering committees are usually tasked with making decisions related to policies, investment choices, and resource allocations. On the other hand, innovation committees work towards identifying technology-enabled business opportunities and coping with the ever-changing employee or customer behaviors.
Benefits of digital operations
The involvement of digital operations helps in freeing up the software and hardware costs incurred by the company. It also leads to enhanced data collection that improves efficiency as well as customer experience.
• Optimizing the Data
In today’s world, almost all companies are collecting some kind of data from their consumers. These large amounts of data can be optimized for better analyses through digital operations.
• Consolidating various processes
The companies use a huge amount of software and hardware in their operations. Digitizing them brings all the data in one place that makes it easy to identify any kind of anomalies in the processes.
• Improving customer experience
Customer Experience (CX) is the latest parameter by which a company’s success can be measured. In the digital era, every customer expects hassle-free and fast delivery. Accenture reported that a single point change in CX can lead to millions of dollars of business for a company.
• Increase agility
A company cannot survive if it is not agile enough in today’s dynamic world. Digital operations help companies to adapt to changing markets and consumer demands. This leads to frequent innovative ideas and faster adaptation.
• Increase efficiency
Improved cohesion between various departments in a company changes the way employees communicate with each other. It also improves the data flow across the company. These well-coordinated efforts improve the efficiency of a company and lead to savings in terms of money, time, and resources.
• Gain competitive advantage
The faster a company can adapt to changes the faster a company grows. As already discussed, digitization assists companies in quickly adapting to changing environments. It becomes easy to identify and sort anomalies in various operations across a company and it helps in analyzing the huge customer data to improve the customer experience.
• Revenue growth
Digital transformation assists companies majorly in two ways for improving revenues. One is savings on incurring costs by making various operations efficient. The second is capitalizing on opportunities that become easy due to better evaluation of trends and improved data analytics.Summary
It cannot be emphasized enough that in today’s world and the future, the successful incorporation of digital operations within the companies is the only way forward to increase agility and accelerate growth. Digital transformation helps organizations in improving internal operations as well as enhancing customer experience. It imparts efficiency in every step of the value chain, thereby improving productivity, efficiency, and overall growth.
