Digital transformation is as an ongoing process of changing the way we do business. It is an investment in skills, tools, technologies and IT infrastructure. Digital transformation is a cultural shift integrating people, technology and business together.

A BUSINESS CASE STUDY

A product manufacturing IT Major needed to digitally transform itself to accelerate its business activities, processes, and its operating models. It needed to leverage the digital tools and technologies to drive higher revenue, better margins and  competitive edge.

Company had robust one of the best supply chain capabilities based on  efficient and reliable third party logistics system. Company manufactured and assembled its products in Asian countries and  distributed all over the world. Major expectation from digital transformation was to detect and minimize missing containers, damage deliveries, reduce theft, higher recovery, faster replacements, better compliance, governance, forecast and prediction on demand supply gap to increase operational efficiency, driving higher partner satisfaction and better customer engagement.

IT major hired a consulting company for digital transformation. It did well to understand complex logistics model, rigid legacy IT infrastructure and started data migration, ingestion and historical load from various sources like Oracle, SQL, GT Nexus, Teradata to AWS using a BDM ETL Tool.

After data migration, all legacy reports on Business Objects, Excel, Access, VBA coded dashboards were to be transformed on Tableau. However, ineffective mapping and untransformed data was the hurdle to build the Business Intelligence. Business reports were in columns and rows. Consulting company pitched to transform hundreds of columns and rows into graphs. However, business needed to see information in detail, like not only what percentage of containers were missing but exactly which container was missing to action upon. Company was essentially trying to retro fit the legacy technology backbone with new-age technology without functional and domain knowledge. After numerous corrective sprints business decided to transform the last mile in-house.

“Digital transformation should have a strategic objective defined in an operational architecture with business use cases. Information flow should be well defined throughout this process”

IMPROVISATION – PULLING THE PROJECT INHOUSE?

This looked like a right decision in the starting but Digital Transformation needs Change Management

1. Skills – The current team did not have Tableau skill
2. Bandwidth – Time availability from regular business deliverables
3. Employee Pushback fearing loss of job
4. Cultural Challenge – Change was not fast adapted
5. Lack of Leadership Communication – Involving business users was another major task as they were reluctant to spend time with the functional staff in transformation.

CHALLANGES IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

1. Lack of complete IT knowledge
2. No holistic vision
3. Resistance to change
4. Cost factors
5. No ROI definition
6. Leadership support
7. Procrastination

WHAT COULD BUSINESS HAD DONE DIFFERENTLY TO MAKE THIS TRANSFORMATION SUCCESSFUL?

1. Leadership Communication – Digital transformation is not only the transformation of tool, technologies and process but it is transformation of entire business model. It changes the way a business operates and interacts within itself and with external world. Business transformation is a change in mind set that business is evolving faster than we are adapting. Communication department should have chalked out plan to communicate that the company’s digital transformation journey doesn’t belong to an individual or department. It is a Company-Wide progress
2. Top Down and Bottom Up and closed loop approach – In this journey business should have consulted all stake holders in the supply chain unit.
3. Training, Incentives and Counselling – Management should have explained that transformation will help gain better skill. Training on new tools and technologies should have been arranged and new motivating incentive plan should have been chalked out.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AN UNAVOIDABLE CHANGE

One of the major driving factors of digital transformation is the rate, speed and volume of data explosion. World is witnessing the second wave of data explosion with IoT and Autonomous cars leading to edge storage and edge computing. World is trying to make sense at the source of data generation before they store it at the main storage.

Companies which are not adopting fast enough will sooner or later feel the need to ride the wave or competitors will be making decisions much faster and winning the business. We can only wait how evolving business models, emerging technologies, people and digital transformation will change the world we live in. We can be assured that world will be a very different place to interact in the decade of 2020.

Scenario presented in this case study is general, not specific to any company

About the Author

Devansh Chaurasiya is an MBA graduate with 15 years of IT experience. He holds expertise is in delivering strategic business projects, digital transformation, business intelligence and analytics within sales, CPG and supply chain domain. He is passionate about driving business outcome and nurturing young talent. He believes coordination, collaboration and change management are the key differentiating skills for better management and growth.