According to a recent article published on the Internet, the rules of commerce and interaction are changing so radically that business strategies will never look the same again. Some global companies who have embraced digitalisation strategies, have grown their revenues and their market values exponentially in recent years. These companies do not always have the best technologies, ideas or teams. Their advantage is in how they wrap innovative business models and digital solutions around their ideas to reinvent customer experience, drive revenue and reduce cost of doing business.
Digital Transformation is NOT about technology or the product that you buy or the software that you implement. It is about changing the way you think about your business. It is about reinvention. It is a corporate culture revolution. It is about the art of the possible. This is your Star Trek moment – “To boldly go …” Your Digital Transformation project team has a responsibility to look ahead, dream and push boundaries, and so design and deliver a business platform built for the future. This is the only way to assure enhanced competitiveness and true business agility across your organisation.
Data science, machine learning and indeed everything in the new Fourth Industrial Revolution requires a much more granular view of data, compared to traditional BI, ERP and CRM projects of old. The sheer granularity of the digital world means that any errors in data are magnified exponentially and they lead to vast deviations from the truth. Think of the effect of a two-degree error in direction if you are travelling 100 metres vs. 10 kilometres vs. 10,000 kilometres vs. 10 million kilometres.
THE BUSINESS OF THE FUTURE
Becoming digital is not simply about taking existing products and services and offering them online or digitally. The digital economy requires a fundamental rethink of how you do business, how you serve your customers and how you generate revenue. Digitalisation is driving entirely new consumption models such as digital services and subscriptions instead of once-off purchases.
Businesses who partner with digital advisory and technology consultancies achieve much more than what any individual business could do on its own in the ever-changing digital world. These consultancies invest in continuous research and learning, and they have delivered diverse projects in the field.
Digitalising your business means that you need to integrate legacy systems and other more modern internal and external systems. You need to streamline, simplify and automate business processes. Most importantly, you need to reduce cost of doing business and improve business agility.
The cost of legacy system infrastructure maintenance, integration and operations and the lack of business agility will become a major constraint when digital native competitors who enter your market, are faster to respond to changing customer demands and operate far below of your cost.
Rip-and-replace is however NOT the way to go. All companies have legacy systems that run the core of their operations. The opportunity lies at the edge, where you directly interface with your customer, either for data collection or for service delivery. Digital technologies will enable you to quickly design new services and adapt current services when client and market needs and requirements change. For example:
- Digital dashboards will integrate with all your organisational legacy systems and deliver integrated, interactive information and advisory services to your customers. Think of a single customer portal that delivers information and advisory services from all your departments on a single, integrated and interactive dashboard. Clients can opt-in for services and receive subscription-based invoices for their selection.
- IoT or edge data collection mechanisms will enable more accurate, faster and more comprehensive data collection from your customers. This will in turn enable you to be much more agile and to deliver richer results and a more comprehensive services portfolio back to your clients with a much shorter turn-around time. IoT also drives industrial automation opportunities.
History shows that roughly 12% of the Fortune 500 companies in 1955 were still on the list by 2014. To survive and thrive through the fourth industrial revolution, a digital culture and a culture of caring about data must be developed, promoted and instilled at all levels of an organization.
SO, WHY THE URGENCY FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION?
Companies are building eco-systems and platforms that enable them to offer value adding partner services to their current customer base. This creates a one-stop-shop for customers and industry service providers, drives customer stickiness and revenue. Companies who do not become the platform of choice risk becoming an add-on service to other platform companies.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing exponentially. All major industries, especially hospitality, logistics, industrial and mining organisations are embracing it. They are effectively slapping sensors on everything and channelling the data into some sort of central, big data store. The next step will be to start applying AI, machine learning and other advanced analytics techniques and technologies on this data. This will produce predictive and prescriptive insights on what is driving their business and most importantly, where their revenue originates form and what drives cost in their business. By 2021 the Internet of Things is expected to support a mind-blowing 46 billion connected devices. If you are not getting onto this bandwagon NOW, you risk losing out to companies who are.
Companies from all industries are rapidly adopting cloud-based strategies. Cloud offers an opportunity for enhanced business agility and rapid product or service development and delivery to clients. Mainstream cloud platforms offer very mature tools and technologies that enable seamless integration to legacy back office systems. This enables companies to innovate and digitalise in the cloud while not incurring unnecessary cost and effort to rip-and-replace the legacy systems that have been supporting their business up to now.
Big Data, advanced analytics, Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will define competitive advantage going forward. As many as 85% of global businesses believe that AI will improve their company’s competitiveness in the marketplace. We are at the cusp of this revolution and early movers will gain massive advantage through learning and gaining experience and more importantly, showing their customers that they truly care about delivering class leading service that add real, measurable business value to their customers.
ONPRO CONSULTING AT A GLANCE
Onpro Consulting is a business and technology strategy and management consulting firm with deep roots in International ERP and Integrated Enterprise software projects. We bring this deep experience in the delivery of business transformation projects to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).
Our mission is to take our clients on a digital transformation journey that aims to reinvent the way they do business.
It is our contention that for companies to be competitive in today’s fast-moving market where consumers require instant gratification, you need to be agile, NOT constrained by bureaucracy, you need to embrace true automation and you need to embrace AI and predictive insights.
The success of digitalisation initiatives requires a strategy linked to the creation of fundamental business value, that is clearly articulated and communicated, and has enterprise-wide validity. 4IR or digital transformation projects:
- Must be grounded in business strategy and not technology centred.
- Must place a very high priority on change management. The perceived threat to jobs is as real as it is unfounded. Continuous learning, training and embracing the opportunity that digital transformation presents are critical to success. Jobs will change, they will only be threatened if you do not adapt.
- Must think big but act incrementally in an agile fashion.
- Must place emphasis on benefits realisation follow through to guard against technology centred projects that do not serve your business purpose.
- Must focus on enhancing customer centricity and business agility as core strategies.
- Are even more susceptible to the old adage of Garbage in – garbage out due to the importance of and the granularity with which data is viewed in the digital world.
Onpro Consulting offers world-class change agent, business and technology consulting, data science, digitalisation and integration technology solutions. With a combination of ‘grey hair’ and bright, young minds our collective IP is applied to interesting projects and we genuinely care about creating value for our clients.
- Strategic consulting on how to leverage the opportunity presented by Digital Transformation, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data and Data Science to reinvent the way companies work and do business.
- Data value chain service. Data is the new oil; it has been said. But data is only valuable if you have the correct data at the right time and of sufficient quality. Enrichment of data from sources outside of an organisation is an important approach to exponentially improve the value derived from digitalisation initiatives. Most importantly, a corporate culture of caring about data quality throughout the data value chain is the keystone to being prepared for the digital transformation journey. No amount of technology is going to fix bad data culture.
- Big data and data science consulting and solution projects. It is all about business improvement decisions not being hypothesis-driven, but rather, based on big data deciphered by pattern recognition – and not by humans.
- The design and delivery of enterprise grade digital transformation projects.
OUR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ADVISORY SERVICE
- Conduct Ideation, innovation and change agent workshops. These workshops aim to identify and list initiatives that will drive increased revenue and reduced cost of doing business. We make use of product development lifecycle methodologies that include market adoption and benefits realisation as outcomes.
- We prioritise and develop business cases for the high priority initiatives.
- We design projects, work streams, deliverables, project teams and critical success factors for each of the initiatives.
- Manage and oversee project execution.
- Design and Implement mechanisms to ensure that envisaged benefits are materialised, and lessons learned are ploughed back into future initiatives.
Some opportunities that are explored are:
- Reducing cost of serving current revenue streams.
- Developing new services and revenue opportunities to current customers.
- Developing whole new revenue sources from potentially new markets,
- Enhancing customer centricity leading to stickiness of customers using the breadth of our client’s services.
- Consolidating your presence with your clients so it is one consolidated message and brand to the market.