Digital transformation, cloud technologies, and the automation of business processes are key topics in companies around the world. Therefore, it is not surprising that companies can work more productively, save resources, or offer a better customer experience with the help of new technologies.
By digitising business processes, companies benefit from a range of positive effects. You can find all the advantages of digital business processes below.
Why digitise?
According to a study by McKinsey, the digitalisation of information-intensive processes can reduce costs by up to 90 percent and shorten lead times many times over. The return on investment depends on your specific situation, but such digitalisation has enormous potential in most companies and is worth exploring the best options.
Considering that countless companies still rely on manual or analogue business processes, this is not surprising. The use of pen and paper, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and printing documents only to sign them and then scan them back in is no longer up to date.
Time is of the essence, not only to free up resources, but also to stay one step ahead of the competition. By replacing outdated techniques with modern (and cloud-based) software solutions, you can implement urgent improvements all at once.
Companies can automatically collect data that can be analysed to determine process efficiency, identify cost drivers, and detect the causes of risks. Real-time monitoring of performance data enables decision-makers to address issues proactively before they become critical.
Cost reduction and time savings are just two of the key benefits of digital business processes you can expect.
Further benefits of digital business processes
Accelerating workflows
The inputs and outputs flowing into a process can be difficult to monitor in manual processes. By digitising your processes, you can analyse and automate every step and decision in a way that eliminates your pain points and helps you achieve your goals. This reduces friction and optimises workflows.
With pre-configured triggers, decision points, notifications, and centralised task details, your team can keep things on track. This is especially true when you are streamlining processes across different business units, locations, or even distributed workforces.
Consolidating various data silos
With a process digitisation platform that enables flexible system integrations, your team can break down data silos that hinder productivity and prevent improvements. By digitising processes, your team can stop spending time and money on the tedious, costly, and time-consuming task of retrieving data from various sources, and instead use tools to query data in real time.
For example, to optimise digital products, you can use tools that retrieve data from customer service, usage data from your apps, and data from sales conversations. This way, you can easily find out what your users really need and want.
Case study: a digitised sales process with Jira
Ensuring compliance with guidelines
With the digitisation and improvement of document management, you are able to meet compliance and security requirements promptly and accurately, regardless of the methods you apply internally or the regulations you follow.
With a tool like Jira, for example, you can add specific requirements and automatically create an auditable trail for each step. This prevents important steps in a predefined process from being overlooked.
Find out how to digitise and automate a process with Jira here: Read the article.
Enabling and accelerating business growth
By allowing your team to focus entirely on their work and mutual information exchange, rather than constantly searching for documents or researching new ideas, they are able to concentrate on their tasks and more strategic matters.
Digitalisation enables your business to modernise its processes while simultaneously accelerating its growth.
According to Gartner, the digitalisation of ITSM processes alone can reduce operating costs by up to 60% by optimising and automating customer support requests and providing valuable information in advance.
Success factors - Why you shouldn't hesitate
You don't have to search for particularly long to improve your processes, but you can start with the process that yields the greatest impact.
Define what your digital process should look like and what you want to achieve.
The use of digital tools allows you to redesign the entire process and build it from the ground up. As mentioned earlier, you can integrate automation at certain steps. For example, send follow-up emails in HR processes to inform candidates about the current status of the application process. This way, you can reduce turnover times to the minimum you desire.
Start by defining your goals
If you start from the end and define what you want to achieve with digitalisation, you can approach the matter without bias.
Offer an exceptional experience along the entire customer journey
Digitalising only certain stages along the customer or user journey will only improve efficiency and performance in specific areas (and to a certain extent the customer experience as well). However, to offer a truly unique experience, you should consider the entire journey.
To improve the customer experience, you must involve all teams involved along the customer journey. This means product management, development, sales, marketing, and consulting teams.
To truly make the customer experience exceptional, you should include the customer in the equation. Talk to them about their expectations and wishes, and where you think you can improve in their opinion.
This allows you to create processes that are customer-centric.
The process digitalisation team needs support from all functions involved in customer contact if it wants to improve the customer experience from start to finish.
This also means that you should not forget about internal processes. Project management, customer onboarding, marketing automation, or sales.
Recruit the talent you need to deliver
Digital transformation is no easy task. In addition to the right approach, companies also need the right employees and qualifications to get started. To ensure that processes can be digitised quickly, companies can set up a centre of excellence that imparts new skills and roles.
Another approach is close, long-term collaboration with digitalisation experts and consultants. Engaging external partners for a single project only solves one problem at a time and neglects the bigger picture. Therefore, build a long-term partnership with your external service providers and grow together with them.
Summary
Digitising processes is more than just switching existing processes to digital tools. Questioning the status quo and imagining what the future should look like encourages you to think differently. To start digitising and reshaping your business, choose one or two key processes. Then develop best practices and roll them out across the company. Once this is done, you can scale from there.
Remember: To be successful and make use of all the useful benefits of digital business processes, you must first set a specific goal. Experts in the field of digital transformation help you reach your goals faster. These can be internal employees or external consulting firms.
