How entrepreneurs and enterprises can unlock higher capabilities and augment growth potential through digital transformation?

Authored By: Rama Krishna Kuppa, Founder & CEO, ONGO Framework

A fast-growing infrastructure and the introduction of conducive policies by the government and regulators have established digital transformation as an extremely potent tool for enterprises to boost their productivity. In an increasingly digital business landscape, strategic organizational planning and capacity building is imperative and necessitates having the right digital strategy in place.

However, developing a digital approach and reinventing business processes requires capabilities which traditional information technologies are not equipped to deliver. In order to unlock the vast potential of modern technologies and offer customers true differentiation in comparison to competitors, entrepreneurs and enterprises need to look beyond just digitizing certain processes to a holistic digital transformation.

That’s where advanced modern technologies like AI, automation, cloud, etc. come in which are not only capable of simplifying business processes but also making them more cost-efficient.

Building an infrastructure for digital transformation

Today, businesses need to be more agile, innovative, customer-oriented, and vastly more efficient in order to keep up with a changing business landscape and consumer preferences. Through enterprise-wide digital transformation, then, organizations can effectively optimize business processes as well as costs. Further, integrating technology into the key business processes can also enable businesses to enhance the value-proposition and delivery of products and services to customers.

The influence of tools like social media, big data, cloud computing, etc. in the business landscape will only continue to grow. This is why it is imperative for entrepreneurs to invest in their business’ digital transformation, and particularly so for small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs), in order to secure a firm footing in an ever-evolving market. Most SMEs have cited the capital expenditure involved in such an upgrade as a factor deterring them from adoption IT so far.

However, modern enterprises solutions are not only smarter but also require no physical infrastructure at all, making them more cost-effective than older technologies. The rise in the number of software-as-a-service (SaaS) based enterprise management products has consequently helped more and more entrepreneurs build digitized enterprises through the use of simple and efficient products.

SaaS-based cloud application services do not require any storage, servers, databases, but offer greater capabilities such as inter-operability and easier customization. This allows service providers to integrate advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining and analytics, etc. into their enterprise systems and business processes to unlock higher levels of productivity like never before.

Moreover, through these digital technologies and SaaS-based platforms that are equipped with them, organizations can integrate their legacy systems with a digitized enterprise management system, thus harmonizing a large volume of data and allowing businesses to derive valuable insights from them.

While on one hand, the inbuilt analytics algorithms and models in the platforms can monitor each step in the customer journey, the analytics engine in them can be customized according to business needs. This integrated data can further enterprises to mine information patterns and enhances services continuously through data-driven insights on customer behaviour, preferences, demands, etc. Moreover, with a single data management system, managers can easily align performance goals, customer service efforts, along with all administrative functions to augment efficiency across teams and employees.

Furthermore, SMEs can benefit immensely from automation, which can enable them to manage not only core business functions such as sales planning, managing finances and supply chain, marketing, etc., but also plan each stage of the customer lifecycle – from discovery to building loyalty.

These processes, which a majority of SMEs still carry out through offline methods, reduces the enterprise efficiency considerably since executives and managers must focus on the operations, thus taking away from the time and resources they should dedicate to developing strategies to serve customers better and retain them. At the same time, digitized business management and enterprise mobility solutions can allow SMEs to expand their business to other locations, without having to worry about the infrastructural or financial challenges associated.

In addition to the core benefits of the SaaS model with respect to operating efficiencies, the time taken to develop digitized, cloud-based infrastructures is much less than that for conventional enterprise IT systems. Through low-code or no-code rapid application development and deployment frameworks, software-as-a-service providers.

There are industries which aim at reducing the development time down to as little as 60 minutes, as opposed to the one to two weeks it takes to develop code-driven platforms. Further, this can bring the go-to-market time period down by up to 60% for these enterprises.

The main foundation is built on automation driven by artificial intelligence. The firm’s low/no code framework not only helps customize specific processes but also facilitates 360-degree digitization with quick go-to-market time. These customized technologies are delivered through a SaaS-based model, which distinguishes itself from that of other players.

While general SaaS products may help organizations digitize given processes or departments, they cannot customize technologies or solutions according to their specific requirements or needs.

According to Gartner, hybrid cloud solutions will have a key role to play in cloud adoption in India. The market for public cloud services has seen steady growth in the past two years as it reached $1.8 billion in 2017, from $1.3 billion in 2016. By 2020, the number is expected to reach up to $4.1 billion. Digital has the power to not only transform individual businesses but also the overall business ecosystem, to simplify and streamline an enterprise’s interactions with key stakeholders such as customers and the government.

More importantly, small and medium-sized enterprises can boost their overall ROI and productivity substantially as a result of the efficiency and flexibility digitized enterprise infrastructures bring with them. According to the Google-KPMG study, digitized SMBs have the potential to grow twice as fast as offline-only enterprises, while further enhancements in digital technologies over the next five years will throw open new opportunities for businesses. Technological preparedness in the present, therefore, will allow enterprises to capitalize on opportunities that emerge in the future.