Be honest… How many times have you heard about digitizing the enterprise?
Don’t tell me you haven’t stopped to read at least once in the last few years, about this obscure operation that would bring not only economies of scale but also important increases in productivity, even by 30/50%.
There is no service in the marketplace that will digitize your business for you. This is because digitization is not a service but a process, and as such can only start from you. Digitizing means abandoning traditional tools, so-called analogical, to streamline workflows and automate activities and procedures, whether they are related to the production and distribution of products and services, marketing and sales, customer care, whether they are relevant to the field of document management of administrative, accounting and fiscal material.
Digitizing your business can radically change the results of your business, but it will force you to review many procedures and will create an initial discontent among many of your employees because it will lead you to change much of your daily work habits.
Digitizing is now not only a must for those who want to compete in such a tight market like today’s but also a must for those who want to question a large part of their business chain.
It means making a list of the individual physical movements and reasoning that you Entrepreneur and all your Collaborators do from the morning when you walk through the door of the company … until the evening, when you turn the key of the lock (and indeed, technically it would not end here).
It means questioning the way you do things, looking for the technology for each of the steps related to your workflow (work processes) that allows you to do what until now takes ten minutes… in one.
Because very trivially, if there is even one operation that lasts one minute, and that between you and your entourage, you will do for 25 times a day, it means that:
50″ saved x 25 times a day x 8 people = recover 3 hours a day, or 7.5 days of work a month.
Let me give you an example so basic that you can’t disagree: the management of paper and all the documents that you and your staff handle? THINK ABOUT IT FOR A MOMENT.
Paper is just one of the themes… because we could also quote:
- the production area (think of an integrated production monitoring dashboard)
- the efficiency of logistics (geolocation of vehicles and related ancillary services)
- travel and business trips (videoconferencing, telephone communications, document sharing and remote teleworking)
- Commercial communication and new customer acquisition (automated web marketing platforms)
Advising you on the point from which to start is really difficult, because as you can easily imagine it depends on case by case, and it is clear that each company will have its own road map with priorities and objectives to be defined during the analysis.
That said, there are sectors that are still little digitized and that pay a higher price than others. These include Manufacturing, Logistics, Human Resources and Public Administration. These are sectors with many different departments and transversal relationships with employees, suppliers, external collaborators, users and end customers, requiring :
- fluid management of all processes;
- automation of activities and tasks;
- the control of a centralized archive that is easy to consult and share;
- the interoperability of the various departments;
- security protocols to guarantee data protection and regulatory compliance.
In order to maintain an active role in the market and to guarantee services that live up to the expectations and habits that have been consolidated since the advent of the Internet, manufacturing and logistics companies are aiming at the adoption of end-to-end technologies.
But I want to leave you a reflexive cue so that in the next few days you can start looking at the processes of your company with a critical eye, and ask you some first questions about how certain daily operations can be streamlined and consequently, how it is possible to introduce a saving of money and time by adopting some first digital tricks.
Remember, the goals of every step of your digitization process must be 3:
1: Saving money
2: Increased productivity
3: Increased safety
Originally published here.