What is Digital Transformation?
Digital Transformation refers to the adoption of enabling technology for your business. Which helps improve performance and accelerates growth to sustain your company's competitive advantage.
A good digital transformation process puts specific business needs first when making technology based decisions as opposed to simply adopting the most popular digital tools.
Why does your business need Digital Transformation?
With the events of the previous years, the need to embrace a digitisation path for your business has never been more pressing considering recent events in 2020.
Most businesses which avoided digitising their companies have had to rethink their positions in recent times. 2020 taught all businesses how important digital transformations are especially if they want to remain relevant.
This article we published back in 2019 explains more on why businesses cannot afford to ignore a digitisation process.
The path to digitisation for a lot of businesses is unclear and chaotic based on the different routes and operational clarity required to achieve the desired end state.
6 key factors to consider in your Digital Transformation Process
Before you start the journey to digitising your business, consider the following factors:
1. Business platform to collaborate
A central system to create and confirm business operations documents is required. Revenue, Expenses, Procurement, Payments, Assets, Payroll, Inventory all need to be created on the platform and verified.
Recording of the above transaction types in the central platform will enable your financial records to be accurately kept and make your month end and year end audits less arduous and your figures more accurate by being traceable to the original transactions.
2. Controls and Approvals
Which members of your organisation have to review and confirm transactions in the central platform?
Separation of duties across all your employees will be a key factor in working in the central platform. Who has access to see certain information in the platform? It's very unlikely your sales people on the ground will also be able to collect money from your customers.
3. Notifications and Automation
With your employees collaborating on the business platform how do you ensure that the next person in the business procedure undertakes an action assigned to them. Workflow and notification of a task is important to keep the business flow productive and ensures that items to progress are not forgotten.
A flexible environment to make sure any type of notifications and workflow of information across the organisation can be implemented easily is key to improving the business flow of information
4. Documents repository
Document management systems (DMS). Most business transactions are supported by documents from the third party either customers, vendors or employees. Easy access to link these documents to the transactions being undertaken in the business platform is key to ensure that the full awareness of the transaction being undertaken is key by all parties internally before they make a decision.
5. Electronic Confirmation and Authorisation
Electronic Signatures have come of age and are no longer the preserve of large multinational companies. Being able to authorise a document electronically by multiple parties is intrinsic to supporting the business process and removing the reliance on paper documents to support your digitisation.
6. Platform Options
In the technology marketplace there are lots of different systems that support the various activities above but it's important to ignore the temptation of implementing multiple systems in your organisation to handle these tasks in individual silos as the issue of integration becomes a drag on your operations and can cause a failure to your operational controls framework.
Moving information between multiple systems is always an issue and the best way to progress is to look for a business platform that has all these features in a single platform to ensure the core of your operational transactions can be on one system and in the business market today, the only platform that can give you these required features is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
Check out this well researched guide published by our CEO on (how to select the right ERP system for your business) as you begin your evaluation of ERP systems today.
Discover how Odoo ERP has disrupted the ERP market and helped businesses in their digital transformation process.