With the start of Covid-19 pandemic, businesses all over the world were put at one choice… Wait till everything pass and if business survives continue, or begin with urgent, forced transition to digital business. These who choose to wait will probally be lost in short time or will have heavy losses. Next lines are for those wo don’t want to wait and want to start with digital transformation…
Somewhere it is called digitalisation, digital transformation, industrial revolution 4.0, but basicaly everything directs to a transformation of business. Whether it is business workflow, procedure, development, production, logistic, process, etc. goal is to transform as much as possible to digital form.
First questions asked by most of our clients with whom I had this conversation regarding digital transformation of business was how much it will cost, how employees will adjust to fast changes, how much changes is enough?
Well, here is simplified version of my answer… It will cost you from nothing to much, it only depends from your company size and your needs. You need to write down what are your needs, is it acceptible to use free and open source solutions depending of acceptible budget…
Based on your answers you start with transforming from analog to digital simplier tasks and processes. First provide your people with VPN access to your network so they can work from home, probably there will be time when they will need to stay at home for lockdown. Great and cheap devices for this situation are MikroTik Routers which are cheap, but have everything your company will need (they can replace in most of functions expensive Cisco or Fortigate gateway/router/VPN concentrator).
After VPN access, your employees will have access to company internal resources. Now second phase is to digitaly transform from simplier to complicated processes in company. Beside it is much easier to work digitaly during pandemic and other non standard work environments, you will see that people are more efective this way and also when you calculate all costs, it is cheaper. Use more phone, emails, online conferencing, task/project management tools and everything which can help you with daily tasks.
Parallel with second phase you can also engage in expanding operations in digital way. For example for store now is ideal situation to build your online store, whether it is on your web site, Facebook or some ecommerce platform, don’t wait. This will help you to get new clients as during pandemic you have to understand that a lot of businesses will not survive.
Online marketing and online presence on web will help you to fill gaps which will appear as some clients will be lost in translation, and this is must be done.
Time has shown that for companies which did digital transformation on time, employees are happier as most of the tasks can be done from home, company efficiency factor is much higher, better budget management, lower costs of doing business, agile response in new situations which can occure…
From some people I heard that their business can’t be digitaly transformed. This is excuse for lazy or people who think they everything know, and this is not true. Every business can be digitaly transformed in smaller or larger volume and it will definitely help you work more efficiently.
If you need help or more info in digitaly transforming your business, you can contact me and I will be happy to help you enter digital era.