To digitize business processes in the world marked by numerous changes is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Customers demand quick turn-around on delivery of goods and services, employees need a balanced work-family life, and investors require accurate and timely information to make decisions. These among others force organizations to re-engineer their processes to accommodate all requests.
Digitizing business processes means transitioning from traditional ways of doing repetitive tasks to adopting digital tools and technologies. When organizations digitize business processes, it enhances efficiency. Efficiency is the cornerstone of business success without which scaling may be difficult. Due to the interconnectedness of efficiency resulting from various processes, the result is optimized earnings which are underpinned by well-executed plans and strategies.
But what’s efficiency? Simply defined, it is about getting more output from the same input or getting more output from little input. To measure the level of efficiency, organizations or individuals concerned need four parameters. These are cost, time, energy, or materials. With these, you can measure the level of efficiency at which an organization operates on a particular aspect.
Leaders of businesses that aspire to stay competitive and sustainable should understand the nuances of business efficiency. There are different forms which are time, operational, and cost efficiencies.
Operational Efficiency.
In its simplest terms, operational efficiency has all to do with internal process optimization. These could be automating repetitive tasks, reducing cycle time, improving inventory management, and enhancing employee productivity. It’s achieved once you identify bottlenecks and streamline processes.
Cost efficiency
Cost efficiency involves minimizing expenses without jeopardizing quality. One of the ways that works wonders here is to adopt cost-effective technologies. By achieving cost efficiency, businesses become competitive and offer competitive prices to customers thus gaining more market share, and boosting profitability.
Time efficiency
Efficiencies of time involve completing tasks within the shortest time possible without affecting quality. This form of efficiency is important, particularly to businesses and sectors where timely delivery is a competitive advantage. To enhance this, there should be effective project management, leverage of technology to automate time-consuming tasks, and train staff.
Steps to Digitize Business Processes.
The steps taken to digitize business processes would be quite lengthy depending on various parameters. However, the key steps are:
- Involve your team.
- Analyze current business processes.
- Define the objectives of digitization.
- Make the right selection of the tools and technological technology.
- Train and support teams.
- Implementation and roll-out of the digitization process.
- Monitor, evaluate, and continuously improve the processes.
Primarily, these steps require a combination of the old wisdom with new skills to make the right blend of digitized business processes.
Success Factors to Digitize Business Processes.
Like any other thing in business or life, there are various success factors to digitize business processes. These are:
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Start at the end output and work back.
To successfully digitize business processes, start to design the future state of each process without considering the current state. Essentially, it’s about envisioning how it would work as intended. After you have designed the end state, reintroduce constraints. However, you should not fear to challenge these constraints because some can be resolved quickly through discussions with various parties.
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Tackle the end-to-end customer experience.
When some aspects of a business process are digitized and others are left, it will never deliver a truly seamless experience. If you address some burning customer issues without going through the entire process, you leave a significant potential on the table. To avoid digitizing processes partially, organizations should create cross-functional units that bring all colleagues together. The mandate of this unit is to challenge the status quo.
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Build Capabilities
The scarcity of digitization skills demands that organizations develop in-house capabilities to create skilled staff. However, companies may have to seek some new skills from external sources. On that ground, it’s imperative to select transformation team leaders who are well-trusted and ready to commit long hours of work to achieve the goal.
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Move Quickly
To digitize business processes quickly, organizations should digitize processes in phases. This would help improve performance within a short period. Some systems complexities may be quite challenging to move quickly but there should be ways to mitigate delays. For instance, parallel running of systems may work well depending on set-ups by the project leaders. The speed at which digitization happens would depend majorly on the board support or decision-making body of the organization.
When organizations digitize business processes, which is one of the success ingredients, it enhances its agility, time, operational, and cost efficiencies. As a result, it saves on the costs thus boosting the business bottom line. With improved profitability, shareholders, employees, and investors enjoy the rewards.
