Introduction:

Companies struggling to support digitization shouldn’t simply automate their existing processes, as spoiled by user experiences on Google and Amazon, people are increasingly demanding enhanced digital access to their records, as well as instantaneous access to the services they’re buying. This increases the pressure on traditional companies and leaves them vulnerable to disruption,

For Example: “Customers want to bank loans to be pre-approved or approved in minutes. They expect all service providers to have automated access to all the data they provided earlier and not to ask the same questions over and over again. They wonder why a bank needs their salary slips as proof of income when their money is being deposited directly into the bank every month by their employer,”.

“Many traditional organizations can’t meet these expectations.”

What is the Basic Difference between Digitalization and Digitization?

Digitalization: is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business.

“Digitalization means turning interactions, communications, business functions and business models into (more) digital ones which often boils down to a mix of digital and physical as in omni channel customer service, integrated marketing or smart manufacturing with a mix of autonomous, semi-autonomous and manual operations”

Digitization: It means process of converting data or information into digital format.

“Digitization and digitalization are two conceptual terms that are closely associated and often used interchangeably in a broad range of literature’s. There is analytical value in explicitly making a clear distinction between these two terms”.

The same applies to business process automation, one of the essential aspects in many optimization and transformation projects. We obviously need digitization and business process automation in today’s business reality. However, just as we ‘digitally transform’ for a reason, we digitize and automate for a reason.

What Can We Do to Start The Process Digitization Of Your Business?

• You want to easily keep track of this information and be able to access them as fast as possible.
• If you want to make decisions as fast as possible, with the relevant numbers in front of your eyes.
• Whether to communicate really fast to your customers as soon as you know you can offer them the best price.
• To learn whether you took the best decisions and how you can improve the next time.
• Don’t think like it’s the 90’s – avoid spreadsheets

What you could do is to use a system like Excel, to store your purchasing costs, manually add the dates, manually add their sales prices, and keep track of when you actually transformed your proposals. Then you can send emails or call your customers who asked for prices. Then you can try to play with the pivot tables to track your revenues. And hope that your data doesn’t get lost because of a wrong move.

But come one! We’re in 2019! And we were talking about using the right products for your business goals, remember?

So, let’s redefine your process so that you can keep your precious time and make better decisions thanks to technology.

Digitalize Your Processes:

“Digitizing your processes” actually means getting every actionable information out of your head by storing it in a software, and design the best user experience for you to fulfill your tasks in the best manner, whether alone or in a team.

There have always been a couple of tasks you always had to do. Though, deep in your heart, you knew they were not driving value to your business. You know what I mean. Filling that paper. Calculating that amount. Sending the same emails over and over again. You may have thought, one day, “I wish someone could do it for me”.

Get Organized!

Even today, lots of businesses still fulfill their processes with this information stored only in the head of the owner, or in emails, or on paper. Though business owners usually have a pretty good memory, we can obviously see the limits of such an approach in terms of scalability of this already complicated business. Moreover, it can potentially keep your brain away from doing more interesting things, and especially make collaboration a bit tough.

Delighting the Customer:

Replacing paper and manual processes with software allows businesses to automatically collect data that can be mined to better understand process performance, cost drivers, and causes of risk. Real-time reports and dashboards on digital-process performance permit managers to address problems before they become critical.

The Benefits are Huge: by digitizing information-intensive processes, costs can be cut by up to 90 percent and turnaround times improved by several orders of magnitude.

Organizations Can Benefit by Digitalization of Processes through following:

1. Implementing Technologies such as smart scanning to reduce manual data entry and repeat inputs in various systems, cutting turnaround times and providing automated notifications to clients for key process junctions. The Nexus of Forces — mobile, social, information and the cloud — will fundamentally change the nature and requirements for decision making.
2. Deploying Customer Analytics and Big data for a better customer experience, customized service offerings as well as for risk and security analytics. The role of technology will go much further than automating existing processes to enable the digitalization of the processes, creating value through capturing, analyzing and executing on the available data.
3. Service Innovation: integrated mobile payment and shopping apps. Through digitalization, companies will deploy new business models to win over the end consumer and create profitable demand.
4. Digital Transformation by partnering with Intermediaries and specialized companies. Digitalization of the processes will reshape the employee-employer relationship and offer a new social-network-based approach to talent management.
5. Service Innovation via co-creation and crowd-sourcing. Ensure that any new technology investment goes beyond automating existing processes to support dynamic and strategic analysis, and decision making, to enable the digitalized value chain.

Final Thought:

Summarizing you can say that digital transformation requires digitalization ‘en route’ to digital business (capabilities) and requires digitization, since the glue and a core business asset of digital transformation (and of digitalization) is obviously (digital) data, leading to information, knowledge, intelligence, action and business model changes.
The choice of digitalization its processes and its degree of intensity requires in-depth reflection, according to resources, needs and objectives of the company. Thus, the definition of this strategy involves the different actors of the company, and not only the information system service.

“Assess the requirements, Explore the opportunities and Implement the changes and Succeed – Sky is the limit”.