Organizations across industries are investing in digital transformation. Some have succeeded in their efforts; others have yet to achieve clear results, and many have failed.

The reasons for failure are many. They include a focus on technology instead of enhancing the customer experience, lack of visibility at the leadership level, siloed capabilities within the organization, and just poor implementation.

It’s important for drivers of transformation to possess a clear-cut idea of how they see their company in the near and long term. Most have financial goals that must be met, but the underlying strategic thinking for getting there is frequently lacking.

A business seeking to expand across a region, for instance, might give short shrift to the complexities of regionalizing and personalizing the customer experience. It might rely on a consulting firm that ends up charging exorbitantly for a high-level “end-to-end” strategy — one that offers zero visibility at the process level, or involves throwing out the entire technology stack and replacing it with something else.

Say a company sets out to provide the best retail experience in North America, with buy-online, pickup-in-store (BOPIS) orders ready in under an hour. But if the business is relying on a cloud-based e-commerce platform for managing inventory and orchestrating orders, it might find itself unable to achieve that vision in a single leap. The rush to realization can lead to unsuccessful transformations. 

Top-Down Alignment

Once a customer-centric vision has been established, it needs to permeate throughout all departments, down to personnel at the warehouse as well as the third-party logistics provider that delivers to the end customer. 

Often there’s a dichotomy between high-level visionaries and personnel in departments that are more focused on current challenges within their specific areas of responsibility. The visionaries must therefore liaise with department heads to understand their viewpoints, and bring them into line with the organization’s long-term trajectory.

If, for example, store personnel aren’t kept in the loop, it might go unnoticed that the replenishment truck always arrives 20 hours late (of which eight hours might be driver downtime). And that failure undermines the vision of providing a seamless customer experience, or BOPIS in under an hour.

Many at the top tier of management lack a clear view of how things are at ground level — for instance, how long it takes for an item to become sellable once the supplier ships it, the percentage of refund violations, and warehouse cycle time for processing customer orders. The result is often a blurring of the organization’s vision.

Focusing on Customer Experience

At the heart of any digital transformation is its impact on the customer experience, and resulting effect on the brand. Technology must be devoted to this end.

For instance, if you’re a B2B business operating on legacy systems and wishing to move to a new platform, it must provide digital consoles and alternative channels for placing orders with utmost ease. It must offer built-in dynamic pricing and promotions, along with gate controls that enable instant notifications when orders are sent to the approving authority. What would otherwise require a 15-minute conversation must be reduced to an upload and a click.

The larger vision should result in a detailed perspective of how technology can help. Vendor evaluations must be carried out with proof of concept as to how the new applications can achieve the desired objectives. 

Once tech vendors are selected, companies must develop a sequential or overlapping “staircase” of kick-off dates, implementation timelines and go-live strategy for each stream. Often, when organizations gain clarity on vendors, they tend to have siloed interactions with each, and award contracts separately and concurrently. 

Much strategic thinking is needed to arrive at a streamlined technological roadmap. For instance, can I change the backend ERP and e-commerce platform at the same time, then staircase it with order orchestration? Or do I start with e-commerce and the inventory cache, add order orchestration, then change the ERP? This kind of thinking exercise must become an integral part of the transformation planning process.

Right Partner, Right Team

Whether support is coming from a Big Five or niche consulting company, it’s vital to have an experienced partner who will walk with you every step of the way to digital transformation, from discovering departmental gaps to interacting with visionaries, documenting critical processes, aiding in vendor selection, bringing in domain thinking and, finally, helping the organization to publish a foolproof strategic roadmap.

Digital transformation today is an imperative, one that promises to determine the future of the business. Granular-level detail is a must, but the overall vision must still percolate throughout all tiers of the organization. The right strategic partner can help in that effort.

Guruprasad Nagaraja is an enterprise architect at Tietoevry.