Business Process Digitalisation is already transforming the global economy and unleashing powerful forces in every industry. The World Economic Forum says: “The digital revolution offers industries the promise of a more efficient, productive and sustainable future” with technology playing a key part in enabling more ambitious sustainability objectives.

Existing digital developments were highlighted by the lockdowns we experienced globally during the pandemic. Which also accelerated their progress and adoption in many cases. Meetings via video, cloud computing, and tap-and-go payments are features of the digital economy that we now take for granted. They’re enabling us to live like never before and have allowed many businesses to function relatively seamlessly despite the COVID-19 crisis.

Digital-adoption.com quotes the following impressive figures in their list of “20 Digital Skills And Digital Transformation Statistics”:

• 51% of digital transformation efforts are fuelled by market pressure and growth opportunities
• 70% of businesses chose to increase or maintain digital transformation spending during the pandemic
• 87% of senior business leaders say digitalisation is a priority
• 91% of companies are engaged in some form of digital initiative

Are you harnessing the power of digital in the best ways for your business?

Which areas could you develop or enhance via digital platforms and programmes? Your organisation’s daily processes are a great place to start. These processes offer ample opportunity for improvement and optimisation from a digital perspective. The advantages of doing this strategically and systematically can be significant for your bottom line and can be beneficial, even necessary, for all stakeholders.

The practice of bringing your business processes into the digital world is most often referred to as “Business Process Digitalisation” or BPD. Let’s take a look at precisely what that means.

What is Business Process Digitalisation?

BPD essentially involves transforming and optimising tasks within a business process using digital tools. BPD focuses on making these tasks more efficient. Thereby improving productivity and various other metrics, ultimately enabling the business to reach its goals more easily.

Many business processes can be improved through digitalisation, including sales, marketing, production, and supply chains.

For example, to improve customer experience, chatbots are increasingly being used to offer 24/7 support. Digital solutions like these allow businesses that couldn’t previously have afforded a 24-hour telesales support team to instantaneously answer their customers’ most pressing queries.

Some of the primary goals BPD supports include:

• Building additional value and generating more revenue,
• Securing or enhancing competitive advantage,
• Incorporating metrics and continuous improvement to identify and pursue additional new opportunities for optimisation.
• Capturing and processing ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) data so that you can both measure progress and communicate your impact effectively.

So, that’s the bigger picture stuff. But what does BPD mean for businesses in a practical sense daily?

Why is Business Process Digitalisation important?

Easing the Daily Grind

When planned and implemented correctly, BPD delivers several advantages for daily business operations, including:

• Saving time and stress for business leaders as well as employees,
• Reduced labour costs and fewer human errors,
• Improved productivity by performing the same tasks at a faster rate,
• Customers’ expectations for a quick and easy digital experience and seamless user experience can be met,
• Customers perceive improvements in the quality of service delivery and/or products,
• The business can gather and monitor data more effectively on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis, which leads to better analysis for improvements,
• Daily ESG activities are easier to monitor, which allows ESG goals (e.g. achieving net zero) to be reached more quickly and sustainably.

Long-Term Leaps and Leads

Provided that the BPD plan is strategic and well-executed, the value of these daily digital interactions can be compounded into numerous long-term benefits. Not least of these is improved profits.

Because digital processes can encompass every area of a business on an ongoing basis, there are also long-term costs and time savings.

Over time, digitalisation allows for process innovation, consolidation, sharing of information, and efficiencies across all units. This is particularly pertinent for information-based businesses where, according to McKinsey Digital, costs can be slashed by up to 90%!

Time saved can be spent on more important things within the business, including maximising its impact in other ways. And time savings are often passed on to the customer too. They’re able to take advantage of massively reduced waiting times and the convenience of remote digital transactions instead of having to request, activate, or collect services and products in person.

A business can also use the time saved from a successful automation project to continue to automate even more of its processes and functions throughout the company, compounding the impact by creating even more organisational capacity to innovate and evolve.

Productivity and integration can be hugely improved through BPD.

Giving employees access to the appropriate digital tools can make their daily work life easier and encourage a digital culture. This leads to increased integration between internal departments as well as between the business and its external collaborators. In turn, the entire organisation can become more relevant, agile, and easier to manage.

BPD can also deliver essential data intelligence.

By replacing manual processes and paperwork with software, data can automatically be collected and mined for information. That information can be used to drive performance, further reduce costs, and avoid potential risks. Business managers can use customised dashboards and real-time reports to identify problem areas and fix them before they seriously affect the business.

Employee engagement and motivation can also be improved through BPD.

Digital platforms, particularly those customised for the company, can give staff a clear indication of where they’re expected to intervene in workflows and processes. By knowing what’s required of them and what their priorities are, team members can focus on performing their roles to the best of their ability while also saving time. Workers who are motivated and have increased time are more likely to provide excellent customer service, which in turn increases customer satisfaction.

Beyond operations, one of the key motivators for the digital change and improvement of an organisation’s processes is external pressure from consumers.

Customers prefer a quick, easy,  seamless user experience. That’s even more true in our post-pandemic world. Thanks to tech behemoths like Amazon, people have increasingly higher expectations of digital experiences from all businesses. They want user-friendly interfaces, instant information, immediate availability, customised services, zero errors, overall consistency, and fewer questions about their details, which should already be on record from their previous interactions with your company.

Businesses that are unable to meet these demands are being side-lined in favour of more innovative organisations taking advantage of BPD. Adopting digital transformation can deliver a better customer experience at a reduced cost while gathering vital customer insights to help drive business growth. Because of these advantages, companies that invest in BPD often find these digital platforms help gain new customers and develop existing customer relationships.

From an impact perspective, going digital can massively shrink your business’s environmental footprint. Reductions in paper use, waste generation, energy use, and more are possible by investing relatively small amounts in software-as-a-service (SaaS) products.

But sustainability considerations don’t end there.

Multiple stakeholders, including regulators, investors, and consumers, increasingly require businesses to be transparent about their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) contributions. Digital tools can facilitate proper oversight and evaluation of ESG metrics, especially ensuring an organisation’s supply chain activities fall in line with its sustainability goals.

The consequence of this, says DeepStream founder & CEO Jack Macfarlane, is that the company’s suppliers will become commercially incentivised to ‘go green’. According to Jack:

“For too long, businesses have been leaning on existing relationships to solve their supplier needs. This is a hangover from the era of the handshake, old boys’ clubs, and cronyism. With digitisation comes a more meritocratic market, a healthily competitive environment that encourages suppliers to deliver the best service, according to criteria such as cost, efficiency, and, of course, sustainability. We need creative destruction and competitive industrial markets: technology and digitalisation are key enablers of this, helping us get to a business ecosystem that aligns itself with investor and management objectives. Good actors will take the opportunity and rise to the top.”

One of the most significant cumulative advantages is Business Process Digitalisation’s influence on brand value. Both among staff and external stakeholders, the company’s reputation is likely to be strengthened by the combination of all the above effects of BPD. In turn, this encourages an increase in audience engagement, sales, and business growth.

So, this sounds wonderful and all, but how do you implement business process digitalisation? Where should you begin? And who does what? Here’s a quick guide to getting started…

How to implement Business Process Digitalisation

Embracing the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of digital processes calls for careful and considered planning.

Firstly, please don’t be tempted to buy a digital system because everyone else is or because you think you should. This is a classic and often expensive error. Instead, revisit your business vision, mission, and strategy, and find ways that digital can support those now and in the future.

Start at the end state and work back.

In other words, design your digital processes with your desired future outcomes in mind. Then look at the process in terms of the end-to-end customer experience.

Tap into feedback from everyone who’ll be using the digital process, especially customers and staff. This can prove invaluable in creating a system that serves both their needs and those of your organisation. Getting their buy-in early on is also likely to make system training and implementation a lot smoother too.

Choose the right digital platform. This is often the most challenging part of BPD, but here is a basic list of attributes that will give you the best ROI on any digital investment.

Look for a digital system solution that:

• Simplifies the automation of tedious, time-consuming, high-volume tasks,
• Eliminates the risk of human error and the need for human intervention,
• Includes analytical tools to gather actionable insights for improved decision-making,
• Offers a modular approach, allowing for scaling of the process to match organisational resources and growth,
• Provides immediate tangible value and savings with the assurance of additional gains to efficiency, speed, and accuracy over time,
• Provides role-appropriate access to data in real-time,
• Is accessible from both desktops and mobile devices.

So, which business processes are you considering digital options for? It’s sensible to tackle them one by one according to your business’s unique strategic priorities. Here are a few examples of processes that can easily be digitalised.

Examples of Business Process Digitalisation

The following are processes across different business functions that can be transformed relatively quickly and easily by digital solutions. There are several digital tools already available for each of these areas.

HR:

• Hiring:  seamlessly scan through and identify applicants best suited for the opening.
• Employee onboarding: create consistent and efficient onboarding and training procedures that minimise costly errors while boosting employee retention.
• Employee analytics and engagement: collect and analyse key employee performance indicators to improve employee productivity and job satisfaction and ensure your employees have the tools that they need to succeed.
• Employee leave requests: employees can submit a request through a web-based solution that is routed to their line manager for approval.

Finance:

• Accounts receivable: seamlessly create invoices, deliver them on specified dates, send payment reminders to customers, maintain electronic payment records, and assist with account reconciliation.
• Purchase orders: requests are automatically routed to the appropriate party for review. Additional features include notifications and reminders, tracking requests, and creating audit trails by storing completed purchase orders.

Operations:

• Operations and project management: keep track of operations and project work, as well as design, test, and implement efficient workflows.

Supply Chain:

• Supply chain management: improve communication with suppliers, distributors, and customers. Process orders quicker, increase productivity, and provide excellent service.
• Contract management: get rid of paper-based processes while offering transparency, consistency, accessibility, and enhanced security when negotiating contracts.

Customer Service:

• Customer support: chatbots can screen customer communications or provide round-the-clock support.

Business Process Digitalisation Advice and Support

Your employees are skilled in their respective fields, but they may not have the technical knowledge or experience to design the digitisation of the tasks they perform. So, it’s well worth contracting digitalisation experts who can help lead this evolution within your business.

At Optimo, we will work with you to devise a strategy, approach, and plan that works with your budget and current infrastructure to achieve your process digitalisation goals. Get in touch for a no-obligation chat today.