In recent years Disruption, Robotics and Predictive have been greatly discussed! Mostly the question was wrong: What can I digitalize? The correct question is: What do I want to improve and how or where can digitization help me?
Do you also have projects in your company nobody knows why they are even being carried out? Another new idea is being chased because someone read somewhere that it's good for something. But just jumping on a the bandwagon without knowing where it's going usually takes you even further away from the actual destination! So don’t follow every buzz word and don't believe that everyone else is much further along and that digitization is a saviour.
The effectiveness and efficiency of the processes matter
Ultimately, the question is not how high your digitization level is. If we are honest with each other, such a calculation says nothing at all. It is not significant how much you have digitized. The decisive factor is whether you have efficient and, above all, effective processes in the company. Effectiveness: the process must support the strategic and operational management of the company. Efficiency: with a smooth as possible run using as few resources as possible.
Setting process optimization rather than digitalization as a goal
It is therefore useless to automate a process in order to be efficient, if you would have to accept losses in effectiveness as a result. Let's look at the example of a CRM system in which an automatic interface to the financial accounting was created. When a prospective customer or even a new customer is created, the master data is automatically transferred to the ERP system and is available in real time there. Sounds good, but is thought too short-term, if it only concerns the interface and the process itself is not changed. As a result, the CRM system now becomes the master data management system and the entire sales team is responsible for the quality of the customer master data. Sooner or later, no one will use the CRM system for its actual purpose: sales control. Automated, but not effective!
Creating transparency about objectives and implementation: The Digital Agenda as a roadmap
So don't ask yourself what you can digitize, but what you want to optimize and how digitization can help. You start with the result of the process: what is the output of the process, who is the recipient of this output and what content with what quality must be delivered? Only when you have clearly defined these requirements you can derive your need for action. Not infrequently you will notice, that for a completely optimized process, including the use of digitization, in a first step you have to prepare differently: define central guidelines, harmonize master data, formalize and standardize processes. This basis makes it possible for you to tackle digitization projects in the first place.
You should create this transparency about the objectives and the way to achieve them at the very beginning of your journey. We call this roadmap the "Digital Agenda". Otherwise, you will catch the wrong train and it will be all the more difficult to reach your actual goal!