Advantages of digitalization
Aided by automation and digital technologies, businesses can unlock new value from data that has been aggregated through digitization, drive organizational change, and create new business models. These are the benefits of digitalization. The overall effect of digitalization across an organization is called digital transformation – more of a process than an outcome.
Why is digitalization important?
The technologies underlying digitalization continue to evolve rapidly, even as they are being adopted throughout business and society. Digitalization, however, is not simply a matter of “more technology.” Digitalization is important for an organization because it unlocks new thinking and approaches in how the organization perceives its role within its ecosystem and its opportunity for increased profitability. Technology is not an end in itself.
With digitalization in place, these organizations can begin to create new value chains and experiences that are collaborative, interactive, sustainable, and profitable.
Here are some examples of enterprises that have used digitalization to transform their organizations into best-run businesses:
Customer experience
The Entertainer, the UK’s largest independent toy retailer, has the vision to be the best-loved toy store one child at a time. SAP Commerce Cloud is helping them to understand their customers so that they can consistently deliver a five-star experience.
Employee self-service and experience
Tapestry, a New York-based global retailer, is using a centralized portal to reach their 17,000 employees worldwide, which has resulted in significant annual cost savings. During the pandemic, Tapestry also conducted real-time pulse-checks with employees on their health and safety during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sustainability
TemperPack, a sustainable manufacturer, has seen a 40% increase in requests for its plant-based, curbside recyclable packaging, favored by its customers to deliver perishable foods and temperature-sensitive medicines. To meet demand, the company is using real-time data from its digital business platform to improve decision-making, streamline operations, and reduce response times to customer inquiries.
What’s your digitalization story?
Is your business on the path to digitalization? If so, where did you begin? Most organizations begin by bringing together all data from across the enterprise into a centralized and integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, where the data is collated and harmonized to provide a “single source of truth” about the state of the business and individual business processes. The benefits of an ERP system include greater efficiency, modern business process standardization, and improved visibility into the business data, which leads to faster decision-making based on better data.
Next-generation cloud ERP solutions deliver these business insights in real-time to enable enterprises to rapidly adopt and modify processes and models in response to ever-changing business conditions. New opportunities to rethink business emerge, as organizations take these initial steps in their journey toward digital transformation.
Source: SAP insights
