#DigitalTrandformation Archives

Advance Enterprise Digital Transformation Efforts By Mobile Apps

Posted on 06/09/202010/06/2021 by Anteelo Master

Irrespective of which industry you look at, you will find entrepreneurs hustling to kickstart their digital transformation efforts which have been lying in the backdrop since several business years. While a considerably easy move when you have to alter your digital offering according to the customers’ needs, things become a little difficult when you start planning digital transformation for your business. A difficulty that mobile applications can solve. There are two prime elements which businesses need to focus on when planning to digital transform their workflow and workforce: adaptability and portability. And by bringing their processes and communications on mobile apps, they are able to hit both the targets in one go. Here are some statistics looking into why enterprises need to count mobile application in, in their digital transformation strategy –

Although the above graph should be a reason enough to take mobile apps seriously, there are some other numbers as well.

57% of the digital media use comes in through apps.
On an average, any smartphone user has over 80 apps out of which they use 40 apps every month.
21% of millennials visit a mobile application 50+ times everyday.

While the statistics establish the rising growth of mobile apps, what we intend to cover in the article is the pivotal role mobile applications play in digital business transformation. To understand it from the entirety, we will first have to look into what is digital transformation and what it entails.

What is digital transformation?

Digital transformation means using digital technologies for changing how a business operates, fundamentally. It offers businesses a chance to reimagine how they engage with the customers, how they create new processes, and ultimately how they deliver value.

The true capabilities of introducing digital transformation in business lies in making a company more agile, lean, and competitive. The end of the long term commitment results in several benefits.

Benefits of digital transformation for a business

Greater efficiency – leveraging new technologies for automating processes leads to greater efficiency, which in turn, lowers the workforce requirements and cost-saving processes.
Better decision making – through digitalized information, businesses can tap in the insights present in data. This, in turn, helps management make informed decisions on the basis of quality intelligence.
Greater reach – digitalization opens you to omnichannel presence which enables your customers to access your services or products from across the globe.
Intuitive customer experience – digital transformation gives you the access to use data for understanding your customers better enabling you to know their needs and delivering them a personalized experience.

Merging mobile app capabilities with digital transformation outcomes

The role of mobile applications can be introduced in all the areas which are also often the key areas of digital transformation challenges that an enterprise faces.

Technology integration
Better customer experience
Improved operations
Changed organizational structure

When you partner with a digital transformation consulting firm that holds expertise in enterprise app development, they work around all these above-mentioned areas in addition to shaping their digital transformation roadmap around technology, process, and people.

In addition to a seamless integration with the digital transformation strategy of an enterprise, there are a number of reasons behind the growing need to adopt digital transformation across sectors. Ones that encompasses and expands beyond the reasons to invest in enterprise mobility solutions.

The multitude of reasons, cumulatively, makes mobility a prime solution offering of the US digital transformation market.

Here’s how mobile apps are playing an active role in an enterprise’s 360 digital transformation.

How are mobile apps playing a role in advancing businesses’ internal digital transformation efforts?

1. By utilizing AI in mobile apps

The benefits of using AI for bettering customer experience is uncontested. Through digital transformation, businesses have started using AI for developing intuitive mobile apps using technologies like natural language processing, natural language generation, speech recognition technology, chatbots, and biometrics.

AI doesn’t just help with automation of processes and with predictive, preventative analysis but also with serving customers in a way they want to be served.

2. An onset of IoT mobile apps

The time when IoT was used for displaying products and sharing information is sliding by. The use cases of mobile apps in the IoT domain is constantly expanding.

Enterprises are using IoT mobile apps to operate smart equipment in their offices and making the supply chains efficient, transparent. While still a new entrant in the enterprise sector, IoT mobile apps are finding ways to strengthen their position in the business world.

3. Making informed decisions via real-time analytics

In the current business world, access to real-time analytics can give you a strong competitive advantage. Mobile applications are a great way for businesses to collect users’ data and engage with them through marketing transformation messages designed around the analytics based on their app journey.

You can use real-time analytics to know how your teams are performing, analyze their productivity, and get a first-hand view into the problems they are facing in performing a task and how it’s impacting the overall business value.

4. Greater portability

Portability in an enterprise ecosystem enables employees to work as per their convenience. While it shows less impact in the short term, in the long run, it plays a huge role in how productive a team is.

By giving employees the space to work as per the time and location of their choice, you give them the space to boost their creativity fuel and in turn productivity. One of the results of using software that enabled our employees to work according to their terms and conveniences for us was greater business expansion ideas and an increase in overall productivity of the workforce.

Tips to consider when making mobile apps a part of the digital transformation strategy

If at this stage, you are convinced that mobile applications are a key part of digital transformation efforts, here are some tips that can help your strategies for increasing the ROI on your enterprise app –

Adopt mobile-first approach – the key factor that separates enterprise apps that are winning is how they don’t treat apps as the extension of their websites. Their software development process is strictly mobile-only. This in turn shapes their entire design, development, and testing processes.

Identifying the scope of mobility – the next tip that digital transformation consulting firms would give you is analyzing the operations and workflows for understanding which teams, departments, or functions would benefit from mobility the most. You should not start reinventing a process which works okay, you should look for areas which can be streamlined, automated, or valued through mobility.

Outsourcing digital transformation efforts – when we were preparing An Entrepreneur’s Guide on Outsourcing Digital Transformation article, we looked into several benefits of outsourcing digitalization to a digital transformation strategy consulting agency. But the prime benefit revolved around saving businesses’ efforts and time which goes into solving challenges like – absence of digital skillset, limitations of the agile transformation process, or the inability to let go of the legacy systems.

The Hospitality Industry and Information Technology

Posted on 09/05/202016/06/2021 by Tushar

Though it’s been a difficult year for hospitality, an increasing number of businesses are making use of the latest technologies to help them adapt to the changing landscape. It is being used to cut costs, improve the customer experience, comply with COVID regulations and to provide insights for development and revenue opportunities. Here, we’ll look at the ways IT is transforming the hospitality industry.

Cutting costs

Hospitality venues are making increased use of the internet of Things to save on energy costs. Devices, such as temperature sensors and smart thermostats, are being installed to control intelligent HVAC systems so that the costs of heating and cooling are kept to a minimum. Similarly, smart LED lighting systems that use sensors to adapt to natural daylight levels or gauge occupancy can cut lighting costs by 80%.

Beyond this, today’s energy management systems make use of AI and machine learning to analyse energy consumption, weather patterns, peak demands and even thermodynamics to optimise energy use. Additionally, the IoT can also be used to monitor the health of systems, ensuring that faulty machinery or appliances are detected and mended before the cost spirals or they break down and affect amenities for guests.

As these systems are cloud-based, they can be managed centrally, so that businesses with multiple hospitality venues can have unified control of their operations. The systems can even be managed remotely over the internet

Improving the customer experience

Technology is beginning to have a significant impact on enhancing the customer experience, with guests being able to use websites and smartphone apps for a wide range of purposes. Today, these include remote booking and checkouts, making reservations in restaurants and spas, accessing services such as room service, reserving parking spaces, unlocking hotel rooms, controlling smart room appliances, communicating with staff, paying for products and services and so forth.

Web based apps and smart devices are also being deployed to improve how staff work, speeding up service, automating processes and eradicating human error – all of which improves customer satisfaction.

Providing insights

Website and app interactions, together with monitoring from IoT devices, produce vast quantities of data which can be analysed to provide detailed business insights. They help hospitality businesses predict peak occupancy, understand how demand for different services changes over time and give a clearer picture of which guests are making use of which services. This can help them better deploy staff, improve inventory, implement more effective marketing strategies and develop new and existing services in line with customer expectations: all of which can help improve efficiency, cut costs and increase revenue.

Storing all that data in the cloud provides hospitality businesses with numerous advantages. The data is secure, helping businesses achieve compliance; there is easy scalability, so that as data grows and demand increases, the company won’t get caught out by a lack of IT resources; cloud-native apps make it easy to undertake data analytics and make use of AI and machine learning; and, perhaps most importantly, as websites, apps and IoT devices all need the public cloud for connectivity, its makes sense to store the data they collect there too.

Helping with the pandemic

Technology is increasingly important for the hospitality industry during the pandemic. By using the internet to offer takeaways and deliveries, for example, restaurants and cafés have been able to stay working during the lockdown and have supplemented reduced capacity once reopened. From a safety perspective, the use of smartphone apps has enabled customers to order prior to arrival, cutting down the amount of time they spend in the restaurant and the number of interactions needed with staff.

For all hospitality venues, there’s an obligation to help the NHS Track and Trace Service by collecting customers’ personal information as they enter. This information needs to be kept for a period of 21 days so that, should there be an outbreak of coronavirus or an infected person being on the premises, all other customers can be contacted. Collecting this information online, either via the website or app means the data is more manageable and secure and can be more easily passed on if required by the Track and Trace Service. It also removes the unhygienic practice of asking guests to fill in paper registers where they often handle the same piece of paper and pen as other guests.

Conclusion

Although hospitality is not a sector most people usually associate with cloud-based technology, many businesses within the industry have begun to see the advantages of its adoption. Advanced websites, smartphone apps, smart lighting and HVAC systems, etc, have reduced costs, improved customer experiences, provided valuable insights, helped businesses survive the pandemic and comply with COVID regulations.

Why Do SMEs Need to Be Digitally Transformed?

Posted on 15/04/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Digital transformation is just something for big business, right? Erm, no! In fact, it’s not completely true that bigger organisations led the way: many of the early movers were the disrupter startups that were digital from the offset. Indeed, it’s being digital that enabled them to become disruptors and forced their larger competitors to react. Today, as more businesses and consumers shift towards digital technology, it’s more important than ever for SMEs to consider how digital transformation can help them stay relevant and competitive. Here, we’ll examine why.

Reacting to change

Shifting consumer behaviours, the evolution of new ways of working and the constant roll-out of new technologies means SMEs are consistently having to adapt quickly to change. Not only are more consumers moving online; they are demanding digital services that provide better customer experiences. Employees, meanwhile, are increasingly seeking to work with companies that enable them to work flexibly and away from the office. To acquire and keep new customers and talented employees, and keep up with competitors, SMEs need to be able to adopt new technologies quickly, for example, deploying remote working platforms for staff or personalisation engines for customers.

To do this, they need to be agile, and its digital transformation that enables this. In particular, it’s the adoption of cloud technology, an infrastructure that allows companies to deploy new servers and applications instantly and which provides them with all the scalable resources they need to undertake their workloads. Indeed, by migrating to the cloud, SMBs eradicate the need for expensive, in-house infrastructures, making them even more agile and putting them on a level playing field with their larger competitors.

Taking advantage of AI

Artificial intelligence is starting to permeate all areas of business operations and its easy accessibility means it’s increasingly being utilised in all sectors. Today, SMEs can use AI for a myriad of purposes. It can help find better ways to procure products or materials, make industrial processes faster and more efficient, monitor machine and system health, provide data insights that identify new opportunities in the marketplace, streamline logistics, deliver human-like chat conversations with customers and identify risk, whether that’s financial risk or risk to life.

A key element of digital transformation, AI is something most SMEs can gain enormous benefit from. The good news is that adopting AI is no longer the major technological leap it used to be. Its popularity means there is a growing number of both open-source and proprietary AI applications that are designed to integrate with company systems – the majority of which are cloud-based. For SMEs that have migrated to the cloud, such technology is merely a click away.

Cyber defence

Being an SME doesn’t protect a company from cyberattack, nor does it remove the obligation to comply with regulation and ensure that data is safe. For this reason, SMEs need to develop a robust security strategy and put disaster recovery and business continuity plans into place.

Though ransomware attacks grab the headlines, there are various other ways companies can fall victim, such as through hacking, phishing, malware infection and DDoS attack. Data can be stolen, systems taken offline, websites taken control of and money syphoned from company accounts. It’s a serious issue: 60% of companies that fall victim to a cyberattack fold within 6 months.

The growing sophistication of cyberattacks means criminals can now buy ransomware as a service or brute force software with built-in AI. As a result, SMEs need advanced tools to defend against them. The adoption of these tools is also a key element of digital transformation. Providing this level of security in-house, however, is not only expensive but requires expertise and this puts it beyond the means of many SMEs. In the cloud, however, both the expertise and advanced technologies like next-gen firewalls, intrusion and malware prevention, etc., are part of the service. Companies will also find that vendors provide backup, disaster recovery and business continuity solutions to help them recover swiftly should the worst happen.

Data storage

Data is essential for digital transformation as it provides the information that applications need to process in order to deliver improvements. Today, businesses gather huge quantities of data, not just from customers and their online activity, but from the monitoring of machinery, vehicles, IoT devices, LED lighting systems, energy usage, inventory systems and more. For digital transformation to work, finding the right storage solution for all that data is essential.

SMEs will need to centralise data in order to control access, create customer journeys and ensure employees have access to the latest versions of documents and files. As data grows, businesses need expandable storage rather than having to go through the risk or rigmarole of upgrading to a bigger server whenever capacity is low. That storage also needs to be secure. Cloud storage is ultra-fast, can be expanded easily, has security features like encryption and access control, and is more cost-effective than buying dedicated servers. Crucially, being in the cloud, it enables remote workers to access data wherever they have an internet connection.

Conclusion

More SMEs are undergoing digital transformation than ever before. Indeed, to stay agile and adapt to change, it is becoming a necessity rather than an ambition. It is, however, a necessity that brings with it many rewards. The starting point for digital transformation lies in the adoption of cloud technology, as it is cloud infrastructure with its robust security and cost-effective pricing, on which the applications, tools and platforms of digital transformation are best run.

Industry 4.0 / Digital Transformation

Posted on 15/02/202015/06/2021 by Tushar

Digital Transformation / Industry 4.0 is on everyone’s mind. Investors are happy to hear from organizations that they are embarking upon a complete Digital Transformation / industry 4.0 journey. Investors love it, leaders advocate for it, directors have to make it a reality, managers have to design for it, but few understand what all it means in the grand scheme.

Hopefully, we can simplify this world for you.

What is Digital Transformation? Let’s keep it simple.

The simplest way to describe Digital Transformation is “Using Digital technology, innovation and intelligence to find better ways to do various things that organizations do today. It’s not about creating something new, but more about improving effectiveness and efficiency of existing processes for better business outcomes.”

Digital Transformation started as Industry 4.0 in some places. However, the idea remains the same. While Industry 4.0 started with the intention of transforming the manufacturing processes using Digital Technology, the principles of Digital Transformation now apply to all functions across the organization.

How does this theory apply in practice? Let’s study an example:

Step 1 – Current State

Map out the current process to uncover gaps that can be filled with better technology or intelligence.

Consider a global paper products manufacturing company. The manufacturing industry team is constantly trying to find opportunities to improve efficiency and productivity and reduce costs.

Energy consumption is a big area of focus for the manufacturing team. Currently, manufacturing industry reports and energy dashboards are used to track the consumption of energy across a few important machine parts.
Operators use these dashboards to identify sections of machines that are in green/red (good/bad) zones in terms of energy consumption and adjust the settings to optimize energy consumption.
These dashboards only track a limited set of machine parts that influence energy consumption.

Step 2 – Future State

Outline what the future should look like, after Digital Transformation.

Energy consumption of machines at the mill (specific reference to Tissue Machines) can be reduced by finding the key driving factors of energy consumption, determining their optimal settings while factoring in for the production constraints in terms of time, quantity and quality.

The following challenges will have to be addressed to get to the future state

There are a few hundred variables in a tissue machine that determine the energy consumption. These machine variables have to be studied comprehensively to identify the key influential factors for energy consumption. Relationships between these variables also need to be considered.
A detailed and statistically robust mechanism is created to generate insights/correlations across all relevant machine variables, to take proactive steps to minimize energy consumption.
Study the process characteristics that influence energy consumption and optimize them. E.g. machine speed, maintenance schedule, aging of parts.

Step 3 – Establish how technology, data and analytics can bridge this gap.

The best way Digital Transformation approach for this example would be:

Select a machine, in a market, which can be managed and monitored easily. Maturity in terms of capturing data, and the groundwork that has already been achieved for manufacturing systems and lean energy dashboards provides an immediate feasibility in terms of execution and adoption.
Build a Driver Model to understand key influential variables and determine the energy consumption profile.
1. Identify Key Variables –
  1. There are ~ 600 machine parts that drive the consumption of energy of a tissue machine. First, shortlist the top contenders and eliminate the non-influencer variables, using inputs from technical teams and plant operators.
  2. Identify primary drivers among the selected machine variables using variable reduction techniques of Machine Learning.
2. Driver Model –
  1. Building multivariate regression models to understand the impact of top drivers of energy consumption using techniques like linear regression, RIDGE/LASSO regression, Elastic Nets.
3. Optimize the engine to lower energy consumption.
  1. Optimize energy consumption by identifying the right combination of drivers under the given production constraints – time, quantity and quality.
  2. Create a mechanism to provide guidance during the actual production hours (In-line monitoring).
    1. Track energy consumption of the machine parts and their active energy consumption states. Identify deviation from the standards.
    2. In case of deviation, provide guidance to machine operators to bring the energy consumption to within defined limits.
4. Adoption
  1. Real-time dashboards, refreshed weekly, provide charts on energy consumption, recommendations, and improvements achieved through proactive measures.
  2. Post-live support to operations teams to enable adoption.
5. Scaling
  Determine phased roll-out to other machines using
  1. Strategic initiatives.
  2. Machines or mills which utilize higher amounts of energy to target higher ROI.
  3. Similarity in process and parts characteristics of tissue machines.
  4. Data availability and Quality.
  5. Readiness and groundwork for adoption by plant operators and energy management teams.

4 key stages in Digital Transformation

How should you, as a leader in an organization, look at Digital Transformation? Organizations should consider the 4 key stages of Digital Transformation, in order to create a sustainable impact on their organization. To make Digital Transformation a reality, all these steps cannot work independently. The philosophies of Design Thinking are embedded in the framework’s interconnected elements.

DEVELOPMENT PHASE:

Focus is on identifying the key areas and prioritizing the Digital Transformation efforts

Stage 1 – Discovery

Identify the key areas of opportunity or risk and related key stakeholders. Detail out the gaps in process, data, insights or technology, fixing which would help capture opportunities or mitigate risks.

Stage 2 – Design

Rapid iterations on design and implementation of prototypes helps reach optimal solutions faster. Build out Proofs of Concepts (PoC) to establish the theoretical validity of the approach. Validate the practical validity of the approach through a Proof of Value (PoV).

IMPLEMENTATION PHASE:

Implementation needs to account for limitations arising from human behavior and scale of the operations.

Stage 3 – Adoption

Building solutions that keep the user at the center of the design, is key to adoption. This means that users must be included in the design and feedback early on. In addition, there should be support for users post design, in the form of FAQs, training videos, chatbots etc.

Stage 4 – Scalability

If we can’t solve a problem at scale, then the solution does not solve organizational problems. The issues that we anticipate at scale, should be accounted into the design in the Development phase. This means considering the technology used, the infrastructure required, process automation possible / required and how to manage future developments.

Like Design Thinking would dictate, the Development phase of the Digital Transformation processes have to always consider the Implementation aspects.

Digital Transformation is no longer just optional.

Every organization is transforming the way they do business. Numerous organizations like BASF, Mondelez, KLM airlines, Aptar group, PepsiCo etc. are already making massive strides in this area.

If you want to zip past your competition, or even stay competitive, it’s about time you started thinking about how to transform the way to do business. After all, there’s no growth in comfort.

What Exactly Is Digital Transformation, and What Are Its Advantages?

Posted on 05/03/201921/06/2021 by Tushar

Digital transformation puts companies in a far more advantages, giving them all the benefits that the latest technologies bestow. However, while the adoption of new technologies is a key element of the process, deeper changes are needed before an organisation can truly reap the rewards. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what digital transformation is and what it can offer.

What is digital transformation?

Digital transformation puts companies in a far more advantages . On one level, digital transformation is the process of adopting technologies like cloud, artificial intelligence, machine learning and the IoT in order to make business processes more effective and efficient. What makes these technologies particularly beneficial is their ability to gather and process data. This enables companies to be more informed about their processes, strategies and activities while giving them data-driven insights to help with decision-making.

The adoption of these technologies, digital transformation puts companies in a far more advantages however, is not merely something that happens in the data centre or in IT, it brings change to the entire organisation, forcing the company to rethink its goals and strategies, reorganise its structures and roles, and to make changes to processes that affect all its workforce. Indeed, for many companies, some of these changes are often necessary before the process of digital transformation can commence. Key here is the corporate attitude to digital transformation. For it to be successful, the business needs to embrace new technologies and this often requires a shift in company culture.

The driving force behind successful digital transformation is the digital leader. This is someone who clearly knows the technologies needed to transform the company and who understands the changes their deployment will bring. These leaders don’t just have belief in the project, they are also able to communicate that belief in order to bring on the cultural shift that’s required – and that’s not just in the board room; it’s across the whole business.

What are the advantages of digital transformation?

Once the company is ready to embrace new technologies and the changes they will bring, there are numerous benefits that can result. Here are some of the main ones.

Making the most of data

Digitalisation helps break down departmental silos so that data can be unified and more easily analysed. As a result, end to end customer journey mapping is attainable, while other forms of unstructured data can be combined to gain previously unobtainable insights.

Cost savings

While technologies like cloud, with its pay as you go pricing, can significantly reduce IT costs, this is just the tip of the cost-saving iceberg. New technology can help companies optimise a wide range of business processes, providing valuable data to show where efficiencies can be made

Consolidation

Modern digital technologies can transform how a business goes about its operations, helping to streamline its workflows and, in the process, cut employee workloads and reduce overheads.

Creating customer-centric businesses

One of the main benefits of digital transformation is that the data it provides about customers enables businesses to improve the customer experience. From websites that offer personalised products to communications sent at the right time and via the right channel and with the right message, digital transformation enables businesses to deliver experiences that the customer wants.

More attractive products and services

Understanding what the customer wants not only improves the customer experience, it also enables businesses to provide the products and services that the customer is looking for. It helps manufacturers with product design and retailers with inventory selection while enabling other companies to offer services which are more likely to appeal to their customers. As a result, companies become increasingly more effective in the marketplace.

Precise market segmentation

The technology available to digitally transformed businesses enables them to have far more information about their customers, helping them to discover new market segments that, in the past, they would never have been aware of.

Omnichannel customer experiences

Digital technology enables business-wide systems to be put into place so that your customers can interact and buy from you when, where and how they choose, whether that’s online or at your bricks and mortar store.

A more agile and innovative business

The modern technology that digital transformation provides is faster, more powerful and more capable than legacy IT systems. It makes it easier for teams to collaborate and enables businesses to react quickly to market changes. It also speeds up the development and launch of new products, services and strategies.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is not merely the process of deploying new technologies, it’s the adoption of a digital culture that embraces this technology and carefully manages the significant changes that it will bring to the company as a whole. As technology is in constant development, digital transformation, too, is an ongoing process. However, once the culture is in place and the technology is deployed, there are significant benefits to be had.

What is digital transformation?

Benefits of digital transformation for a business

Merging mobile app capabilities with digital transformation outcomes

How are mobile apps playing a role in advancing businesses’ internal digital transformation efforts?

1. By utilizing AI in mobile apps

2. An onset of IoT mobile apps

3. Making informed decisions via real-time analytics

4. Greater portability

Tips to consider when making mobile apps a part of the digital transformation strategy

Cutting costs

Improving the customer experience

Providing insights

Helping with the pandemic

Conclusion

Reacting to change

Taking advantage of AI

Cyber defence

Data storage

Conclusion

What is Digital Transformation? Let’s keep it simple.

How does this theory apply in practice? Let’s study an example:

Step 1 – Current State

Step 2 – Future State

Step 3 – Establish how technology, data and analytics can bridge this gap.

4 key stages in Digital Transformation

DEVELOPMENT PHASE:

Stage 1 – Discovery

Stage 2 – Design

IMPLEMENTATION PHASE:

Stage 3 – Adoption

Stage 4 – Scalability

Digital Transformation is no longer just optional.

What is digital transformation?

What are the advantages of digital transformation?

Making the most of data

Cost savings

Consolidation

Creating customer-centric businesses

More attractive products and services

Precise market segmentation

Omnichannel customer experiences

A more agile and innovative business

Conclusion

Delivering excellence, collaborating across time zones.

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