Digital Transformation is a term we are all either hearing or talking about but is it a buzzword like so many others - or is it here to stay?
If the recent CeBIT conference in Hannover is an indicator, it is clear that it is still the most important topic for the majority of software vendors. Regardless of the capabilities they have developed within their respective solutions, all vendors are focused on helping their clients to move towards the holy grail of becoming a digitally oriented company.
What does it really mean?
As with so many trends, an expression such as ‘Digital Transformation’ means different things to different people. On the one hand, it is about becoming completely connected and getting rid of all paper based and manual processes; for others, it entails a complete overhaul of their business model by focusing on delivering a service rather than a product.
We seem entirely focused on digital business transformation. Or, in other words, transformation in the context of digital businesses, where there is a decentralized shift of focus towards the periphery of an organization's ecosystem. In the broadest sense, the customer (both external and internal) is at the center of this equation, with worker satisfaction, partnerships and stakeholder value all being key, additional factors.
Technology is not the goal
It is clear that new technologies, ranging from the Cloud to Big Data through to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the IoT are having an impact in three very different ways. They are either:
1) Enablers of digital transformation
2) Causes of digital transformation needs
3) Accelerators of innovation and transformation.
So, existing and emerging technological developments are key yet, technology is not the end point and will only ever be part of the equation. The central role of any organization is to now connect the dots and overcome internal silos across systems & business processes in order to achieve their long term goals.
Full Digital Transformation is not realistic
So, how does this work for those small, but critical, elements of business process which seem incredibly hard to completely automate? Many medium and large businesses have to ensure that information captured from third parties is validated and then enriched with additional data. Such key processes can be extremely labor-intensive without a solid outsourcing back-up.
In a recent discussion I had with the innovative leader of a BPO business, I learned how important this kind of outsourced back up is for companies in their journey towards achieving digital transformation. He shared with me the example of a large freight train business where paper-based documents are still required. At the point of transfer, their client transmits the entire freight document to them to validate and then enrich with relevant data extraction in a turnaround time of 30 minutes or less. This is the only manual aspect of the entire business process but nevertheless, a critical element, which occurs more than million times each year.
The BPO company had to invest heavily in high-speed connections, highly trained and skilled people, to match the exact business process of their client.
Given the strong focus on the technology component of the Digital Transformation agenda, I’d like to draw your attention to the real back-office automation - the almost forgotten or missing link, ensuring all mission-critical processes are truly connected.
Whilst at the CeBIT, I also met with Bernard Poll, CEO of Orone Group, who have continuously invested and developed their BPO business in France, Belgium and nearshore, in Morocco. Orone provides solutions to streamline and secure data and document intensive business processes. They have developed generic platforms to support processes such as customer onboarding, order registration and invoice processing. These also extend to business specific processes: KYC in the bank sector, customer support in the utilities sector.
Below are some of the insights he shared with me from the 20 years he has been running his business, particularly in the light of the increasing focus on Digital Transformation:
GK: What sort of services do you offer your customers and what value do you deliver for them?
BP: Our services include both the technology to automatically collect, extract, analyze and manage data and the human resources that will monitor the process, qualify produced data, complete the automated work when needing adding business-specific intelligence and human interactions.
- We have finetuned all our processes to the extent that we can guarantee shorter processing times for our customers; we also have the ability to accommodate fluctuating volumes of work, which we can easily scale up or scale down.
GK: What are the major changes you have witnessed amongst your customers during the last 5 years?
BP: “Digital” consumers and B2B customers have new expectations. Our customers have adapted their front end to offer digital, and sometimes, mobile interfaces. However, for a full digital experience, back-office processes also have to be re-thought to deliver the quick and streamlined answers their digital customers expect.
GK: How has this impacted your business?
BP: Adapting our offer and platform to address those new needs allowed us to bring extra value to our existing customers. It also let us acquire new customers that have not previously outsourced who were then faced with new constraints that they could not easily meet.
GK: What major changes do you anticipate in the near future?
BP: Digitalization of interactions and processes provide extra, more accurate, data, especially on customer habits and behaviour. We expect business process to take advantage of this data to become more efficient and customer oriented.
On the other hand, the ability for gathering, qualifying and interpreting this data can make a decisive difference between competitors in many sectors.
GK: How quickly do you expect these changes to take place?
BP: The digital revolution will probably be much quicker than the industrial revolution. But I don’t expect it to occur in only a few years. While investing in the new economy, our customers still need their “old” business to run efficiently.
GK: Is there still a market for BPO companies during the next decade, as an increasing proportion of companies go completely digital?
BP: BPOs should join this transformation, helping their customers build unified processing models, supporting both legacy channels and new digital ones.
BPOs should leverage their flexibility and agility to offer new services, adapted to a world that expects business to be highly available and to run fast.
GK: How do your BPO services help your customers with their digital transformation that would otherwise be challenging for their in-house operations?
BP: Digital transformation is not only about opening digital channels to interact with customers, it’s a strategic enterprise project that will change the way people work and the way business is done.
Starting this project with the idea of keeping both physical and digital processes alive is not only expensive, it is a prevents real change from happening.
We give our customers the ability to transform all their unstructured data and documents (like mail, orders, contracts and invoices) in structured data with the ability to be used in their digital workflow, allowing them to promptly switch to a full digital environment.
GK: What do you perceive as the Top 3 added value features you provide for your clients?
BP: Firstly, it would be the comfort of working with an industrial solution that provides visibility on the processes, flexible capacity giving you complete control of the quality able to anticipate delays.
Secondly, it would be the ease of plugging such solution into your environment, using our connectors.
Lastly, it would be the overall cost: mutualisation, automation and access to our nearshore resources makes it a very competitive solution.
So, for me, the message is clear; if you are looking to achieve full digital transformation, whilst keeping all of your existing processes running like clockwork, don't overlook the option of outsourcing any processes that are too labour-intensive to undertake yourselves in-house.
