You’ve hired the best people in their field—but chances are, they’re not delivering on their full potential. Instead, they’re spending a big chunk of their time simply searching for files or contact details, or clearing their brain between tasks as they try to remember what they need to do next.
In many large organizations, information is poorly categorized and difficult to access, and companies lack processes to ensure that workers can easily perform a required task. IDC and Adobe found that this confusion leads to a major hit on productivity: It costs businesses nearly $20,000 of each information worker’s annual salary, and amounts to a loss of more than 20 percent of the organization’s overall productivity.
While many companies are laser-focused on innovation by creating groundbreaking new products, they may be better served by first focusing on using digital tools to transform their existing business processes through automation.
It’s time to ditch the spreadsheets and create streamlined workflows that enable your team to spend their time doing what they’re best at, rather than constantly looking for information. Here are a few key processes that your organization should look at digitizing:
Asset Management
Your company’s equipment and IT devices all have different service and maintenance needs, and it can be challenging to manually track how often each asset needs to be serviced and how to allocate additional resources to replace the ones that are out of commission.
Digitizing this process enables your team to easily automate bookings for services and maintenance for equipment; perform system upgrades on an automated schedule; and identify which assets are currently in use. With connected sensor-driven IoT technology, your team can even track when an asset is in need of repair before breaking down, allowing for predictive maintenance that keeps your company running more smoothly, with fewer interruptions.
Supply Chain Management
Keeping track of all the parts of your company’s supply chain used to involve a lot of phone calls and emails. But today, many organizations are automatically tracking the status and location of every element in their supply chain, even incorporating geolocation data from RFID chips or sensors.
Moving to a fully digitized supply chain can boost your company’s bottom line: A PWC study found that companies with digitized supply chains have seen efficiency gains of over 4 percent annually, boosting revenue by nearly 3 percent per year. Moving to a fully digitized supply chain is an increasingly high priority for today’s enterprises: PWC also found that a third of respondents had started to digitize their supply chains, and that 72 percent planned to do so within a five-year period.
Compliance Documentation
Often, companies require a lot of paperwork to be passed back and forth and signed in order to ensure compliance around certain issues, such as new vendor onboarding, staff training, and adding new regulations—leading to significant delays in getting approval and wasting time for all involved.
Today’s companies can heavily automate these processes by creating standard online workflows that ensure that everyone involved will see the documents, be able to easily read and sign them, and will receive repeated reminders if they don’t participate.
Internal Project Management
Your company most likely has many internal projects under development at any given time, and just a few project managers responsible for tracking their progress and communicating clearly with all stakeholders. If she or he is doing this manually, it’s time for an upgrade: While many project management systems are commercially available, you may be best served by developing a custom solution that fits with your specific workflow.
Conclusion
These are just a few areas where digitization can play a major benefit—our team has found that any situation where a specific person is responsible for a large amount of day-to-day data entry and process management can be completely transformed by embracing digital transformation.
Digitization isn’t about reducing the amount of human labor on your team; it’s about cutting out the busy, non-productive work from their day—allowing them to focus solely on what they do well. By upgrading your business processes, your team can minimize the stress and effort of tasks that have a negligible impact on your company’s bottom line, and can instead focus on innovative new solutions that provide true value.
