Digital Transformation Playbook: Your Business Processes

Digital Transformation = Competitive Advantage

Digital transformation is no longer just a buzzword. In fact, digital transformation when done right, is a competitive advantage.

Research from McKinsey shows that 80% of businesses have begun a digital transformation initiative. However, just 14% of those businesses say their digital transformation efforts made and sustained performance improvements, and only 3% considered their efforts a complete success.

Why such a high rate of failure? A common mistake is companies dive into digital transformation before putting together a clear plan.

We’ve identified five key components to a successful digital transformation which you can learn more about in this playbook.

In the first article in our digital transformation blog series, we explored the role of employees. In this article we are going to focus on the second component of a digital transformation initiative, your business processes.

Your Business Processes

As part of your transformation initiative, consider which of your current business processes are outdated and causing friction.

Are there any current elements of your business processes that aren’t working anymore? That’s normal; the business world is constantly evolving and growth-focused businesses need to evolve along with it.

However, most companies tend to take a “set it and forget it” approach to how they do business. This is a surefire way to stagnant growth.

At BrainSell, we’ve developed a unique way of assessing current business processes and modernizing them to align with your digital transformation strategy. Business Process Redesign helps you evaluate your current processes and identify areas of strength, weakness, and gaps.

Nine Steps to Transform Your Business Processes

While the undertaking of redesigning your processes may seem daunting, we’ve broken it down into nine steps.

1. Assemble the Stakeholders: These individuals must have the authority to make decisions on behalf of their teams (i.e., Sales, Marketing, Finance, Support) and be willing to invest time outside of their typical day-to-day responsibilities to ensure project success.
2. Understand the Current Process: Evaluate and document what’s working and what’s not working.
3. Keep the Customer Top of Mind: The best way to keep the customer front and center during the redesign project is to ensure that every phase of your new process starts and ends with a step taken by a customer.
4. Gather and Analyze Data: Analyze data to identify the areas of your process that should be prioritized for improvement.
5. Establish Meaningful Measures: Measures are clearly defined data needs. Establish leading indicators (e.g., new orders, number of sales leads), in addition to more traditional operational or lagging financial indicators (e.g., bookings, cash receipts).
6. Map Out Your New Processes: With help from a neutral facilitator (such as contracted consultants like BrainSell), hold a series of workshops to map out how you would like your current process to change.
7. Make Recommendations: Keep a running list of ideas and recommendations and score the items on this list against an agreed-upon system.
8. Implement Recommendations with Agility in Mind: Don’t try to bite off more than you can chew. Take an agile approach with the high-score recommendations first and understand how it impacts the entire process.
9. Create a Constant Feedback Loop: Continuously gather and analyze feedback to ensure your process evolves with the market and ensures nothing slips through the cracks.

Transforming your internal processes is essential for digital transformation  success and will improve the way you do business.

How to Get Started on Your Digital Transformation

We get it. This journey can be daunting. But having a partner who knows what they are doing can help streamline moving towards digital transformation and avoid becoming one of the 83% of companies that fail. That’s exactly what we are here for.

Don’t be afraid to ask us questions. Reach out to us, and our team of growth enablement experts can share first-hand experience of what it truly takes to digitally transform your business right from the start.