Questions our customers are asking about digital transformation

Here are some of the most common questions our clients are asking at the moment. Do any of them resonate?

• How can my business meet customers’ changing demands and maintain a competitive advantage?
• How can I garner more insights from my data and use that to improve decision making across the business?
• How can we create a more joined-up approach and step up the visibility across our organisation?
• How will AI and automation affect my business, and do I need to be using it now?

As these questions show, there’s definitely a realisation that innovation is important for business growth. But despite this understanding, many businesses aren’t necessarily turning their ambitions into reality.

In recent research by EY Global, 62% of business leaders said it was critical to transform their organisations in the next two years. Yet only 2% believed they were fully optimising the benefits of digitisation in their key processes **.

So how do you go about digitally transforming your business?

It’s a complex question, but we have three key tried-and-tested stages that we follow:

1. Listening to our customers and discovering their challenges and ambitions. For this we use our Employee I.D.E.A System.
2. Ensuring all the foundations are in place for digital transformation, including cloud solutions and a solid cyber security set-up.
3. Planning and implementing transformation solutions that are right for your business.

Let’s have a look at these three stages in more detail.

Listening and understanding your business needs and ambitions.

There’s one place that we think all transformation should begin. And that’s with your people. After all it’s the individuals who determine your success – or failure.

That’s why we always start our client relationships by listening. We talk to individuals in different departments, finding out their motivations, their challenges and how technology might be able to help them.

From these individual stories, we’re able to start building a comprehensive picture of your business. We’ll look at how your teams work together and how they might interact with other departments to increase efficiency or grow more effectively.

In our experience, successful transformation projects rely heavily on cross-company working. Companies that have joined up processes tend to be more effective and much more able to self-organise at speed.

It’s also essential that everyone understands and buys into your digital strategy if they are to get behind it fully. So rather than kicking off with conversations about strategy, or any technology, we always take a people-first approach.

Laying the right foundations to increase the success of your digital transformation

Once we understand your teams and motivations, we’re all about making sure you have the right foundations for successful transformation.

In our experience, there are three key areas that need to be right before transformational technologies can be properly integrated. What are these three areas? Cloud solutions, cyber security and managed services.

Let’s look at these three foundational areas to get an idea of how they can help you.

Cloud: using Microsoft cloud solutions for effective data integration

Cloud-based systems have already transformed businesses across a wide range of industries. In today’s fast-paced world, every company needs to stay on top of their cloud solutions and services if they want to keep evolving and benefiting from the technologies that come to market.

Whether you need cloud storage or more flexibility, we cover the entire software spectrum, including assessment, migration, implementation and integration. We also have relationships with leading cloud service suppliers like Microsoft, Cisco and Amazon, so we can offer you the very best tools and solutions on the market.

With cloud-based structures in place, you’ll be able to maximise your digital business strategy. Ultimately, this means you can continue increasing your business flexibility, reducing risks and costs – and making decisions based on data insights from across your organisation.

Find out more about our cloud-based solutions, or book a free consultation call with us today.

Cyber security: three layers of security that help keep your business safe

For any kind of digital transformation you’ll need to have your cyber security nailed down to keep your business safe.

At Emerge Digital, our cyber security offering has three layers:

• Proactive Security. To prevent breaches in the first place, we use a range of tools to safeguard your business from malicious websites, malware, email phishing and spam.
• Protective Security. When potential threats pop up, you have to catch them quickly. We’ve got you covered with rock-solid malware protection, login checks to keep hackers from getting into your systems, and detection strategies to stop rogue devices before they cause harm.
• Reactive Security. With solid protective and proactive security, you’ll shut down most threats, but some will still slip through. So our last layer quickly recovers systems to a safe state. This is about providing back-up and recovery, a local vault to minimise data loss and hybrid cloud recovery which provides on and off-site data storage.

With these layers in place, you’ll be safe from hacking or malicious software that can cause huge financial or reputational damage to your business.

Find out more about implementing a strong cyber security set-up. Or why not book a free consultation call to talk through your requirements or challenges?

Managed Services: how we can help you achieve your business objectives

Our managed services offering is all about keeping your business running 24/7/365. With your IT taken care of, you can concentrate more time on helping customers and growing your business.

Before working with clients, we start with a free IT security health check and spending review, followed by a benchmarking exercise to compare where you are now, with where you want to be. From here, it’s our job to create a clear action plan – or as we call it, a Service Delivery Plan.

Every month, we’ll measure and report on your processes and make sure you’re getting the most out of the technology you’re investing in. Our overall ambition is always about transforming your IT from a business cost into a positive customer experience that’ll help you grow your business.

To see how our managed services can help you, please visit our managed services pages. Or to discuss your specific needs, please book a call with us today.

Making digital transformation happen

With sound infrastructure in place, you can start moving from traditional business processes to becoming a digital leader. If you want to be a Netflix rather than a Blockbuster, you need to start changing the game before it changes you.

When it comes to digital transformation, Many IT companies like to sell-in big platforms, or convince clients that a full overhaul is the only way to effectively evolve. We beg to differ.

We believe the most effective way for SMEs to transform is to do it in small increments, learning as you go and applying lessons to maximise the impact of your new technology.

Part of this process is dovetailing new technology with your existing infrastructure, which allows you to innovate cost-effectively with low risk and without shelling out for expensive platforms.

To see how ready you are for automation and innovation, you can take our free Automation-Ready Assessment. In just a few minutes you’ll receive a bespoke report and next steps for your business.

Transforming your business with the Microsoft Power Platform

When it comes to integration, we’re big advocates of the Microsoft Power Platform. This smart piece of technology is made up of multiple elements that can help you increase efficiency and reduce costs.

If you’re not familiar with the platform, here’s a top-line view of the four key components:

Power Automate

A simple way to connect your business processes and automate them effectively.

Power BI

A data visualisation platform, giving you valuable insights that can prompt proactive action.

Power Apps

A way to create apps quickly and cheaply, then integrate them into your business.

Power Virtual Agents

Build chatbots that interact and take actions for your customers.

You can find a more in-depth overview of the Microsoft Power Platform in our recent blog post.

How can the Microsoft Power Platform help SMEs?

One of the things we love about the Microsoft Power Platform is that it can be implemented in stages. You can also adopt certain elements without adopting others, meaning you only pay for what you need.

Using the platform, we’ve helped many clients to make savings and improvements with just a small investment. To see what we mean, take a look at our case study, which shows you how we used the Microsoft Power Platform to help our client Cazoo Wholesale.

Office Manager at Cazoo Wholesale, Jenny Hodson, explains the effects in her own words: “Thanks to Emerge Digital, Power Automate has helped us save time and money, and with their help, we will be looking at streamlining more of our processes.”

Conclusion

Today, digital transformation is vital for any business. This is no time to be a Blockbuster. Innovation and ongoing digital evolution are essential if you want to keep growing and secure a competitive advantage.

Yes, the process is complex, but it doesn’t have to be daunting, or involve an expensive overhaul. Instead it’s about taking small incremental steps.

It’s about understanding the people and teams at the heart of your business, laying foundations and then implementing digital transformation in a way that supports your unique business requirements.

Whether you’re ready to implement the Power Platform, or need to fine tune your cyber security or cloud solutions first, the key is to keep moving forward.

To see how ready you are for automation, you can take our Automation-Ready Assessment. Or to find out more about the Microsoft Power Platform and how it could help your business, please get in touch.

 

*Grand View Research, Market Analysis Report. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/digital-transformation-market

**https://www.ey.com/en_gl/covid-19/21-ways-to-build-a-better-working-world-in-2021

Identifying missed opportunities in digital transformation

When businesses are considering digital transformation or moving towards automation, they often start big. Traditionally, many companies have tackled problems with their production, manufacturing or logistics processes by investing in large, generic ERP systems. Others spend a great deal of time and money developing more customised software.

In both cases, some problems will undoubtedly be solved. However, despite the large-scale investment, many day-to-day processes are still left untouched by technology. 

At Emerge Digital, we call these untouched areas the ‘white space’. They are the places that generic systems can’t reach. The spaces that can’t be impacted without more bespoke solutions or a deeper understanding of your business.

For us, ‘white space’ isn’t just an untouched area of your processes, it’s also a missed opportunity to innovate and drive value. That’s why we make it a key focus and help our clients to turn it into a competitive advantage. 

To eradicate ‘white space’ and move towards digital transformation, book a call with us today. Or keep reading to discover a few ways to kickstart the process.

 

Creating a low investment, high return strategy for your business

At Emerge Digital, we believe the first step towards automation shouldn’t involve tech at all. For us, effective digital transformation starts with the right methodology and mindset.

Let’s face it, as human beings we rarely get things right first time, especially when we’re innovating. We make mistakes and learn from them. It’s how we progress.

The problem is: since we were young, we’ve all been programmed to see failure as a negative thing. Failure has traditionally been a taboo topic, with leaders trying to deflect or cover up mistakes in the name of smart business. 

But when it comes to digital transformation, we believe embracing some level of failure is critical to success.

Of course, we’re not the only ones with this view. Many companies, most notably GoogleX, also known as Google’s “moonshot factory”, actually seek out failure. The quicker they fail, the better. It means they avoid costly mistakes and weed out weak ideas before investing in them. 

In today’s fast-paced world, innovating successfully involves failing fast, cheaply and intelligently. We understand it’s not easy to change mindsets, but doing so can give you a real competitive advantage. 

 

Overcoming the challenges of traditional digital transformation platforms

Once the mindset is sorted, the next step is deciding on the technology solutions themselves.

After many years helping clients with digital transformation, we’ve found that a lot of solutions on the market tend to go against the mindset we’ve just talked about. Systems are often designed to fail slowly, which means expensively.

In addition, digital transformation projects often have unclear endpoints. As final objectives are usually decided so far in advance, they are often abstract and theoretical, which means businesses buy into large systems without a clear view of what they’re getting.

There’s also the issue of off-the-shelf solutions. Many digital transformation systems adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, which is understandable. However, it means that many businesses end up bending to fit with the software, rather than the other way round.

So what is the solution? Can you buy software that offers more flexibility and evolves with your business? In our eyes, the answer is yes. And it comes in the shape of the Microsoft Power Platform.

 

Introducing the Microsoft Power Platform 

The Microsoft Power Platform offers a unique technology solution for SMEs. It allows you to fail fast and fail intelligently. And as it’s low code, it can be implemented quickly and cheaply. 

One other core benefit of the Microsoft Power Platform is that it offers ongoing feedback loops that help you find failures and course-correct quickly.

If you’re not familiar with the Microsoft Power Platform, it’s broken down into several key elements:

 

Power Automate

This tool allows you to connect your business processes and to automate them effectively. It’s all about cutting out those manual processes that take up time and effort. 

Power BI

Meet the data analytics element of the platform. Power BI takes your raw data and presents it dynamically and visually, giving you valuable insights that can prompt proactive action. 

Power Apps

Build apps quickly and cheaply, then integrate them into your business. You can build almost anything you need – imagination is the only boundary.

Power Virtual Agents

Now you can build chatbots that interact with users within your apps or on your website. Some virtual agents can also be programmed and automated to take actions for your customers.

 

Underpinning all of these elements is the ‘book of truth’ called the Dataverse. This helps you store, manage and interact with your data in interesting ways. 

As there are thousands of data connectors, any apps you develop will seamlessly link with your current business applications. Plus, with its low code AI capabilities, you can start bringing AI into your business – no data science degree needed!

To find out how the Microsoft Power Platform can work for you, please get in touch for a no-obligation chat.

 

Mindset and Microsoft Power Platform: A powerful combination

At Emerge Digital, we believe the combination of a fail-fast mindset and the capabilities of the Microsoft Power Platform can give businesses a real competitive advantage.

We’ve helped our clients to create rapid prototypes, using a build, measure, learn feedback loop. This allows you to iteratively design innovations and launch ideas quickly and cheaply, without the burden of heavy risk. 

In effect, you can make mistakes, and identify new ways of driving efficiency and increasing revenue, without any huge costs or impact on the wider business. 

Of course, talking theoretically is great, but what could this look like in practice? 

To demonstrate the benefits, we would like to share some of the ways we’ve worked with our client, CD Auction Group.

 

Spotting an opportunity for automation

Cazoo Wholesale has over 30 years’ experience remarketing and managing vehicles for many of the UK’s leading organisations. With thousands of vehicles passing through their systems each week, they need seamless processes at every stage. 

As one of our clients, Cazoo Wholesale have been benefiting from our ongoing technology strategy for a while. Through this process, our team and client identified an opportunity to update and automate one of their manual filing processes. This has made a big difference to the business.

Up to 600 times a month, the team at the Cazoo Wholesale had to gather information from V5c documents (vehicle log book documents). To do this, they’d need to search through a filing cabinet, get the information, scan the document and refile it. This was not only time-consuming, it was also open to human error – and occasionally resulted in files being misplaced or lost.

Our job was to streamline this process and help the team to save time and money.

 

Microsoft Power Platform: the solution

We kicked off by using Power Automate – one part of the Microsoft Power Platform. Instead of manually scanning and sending on the information, a multi-function printer now scans a V5c, turns it into a PDF and emails it to a designated address. At this point, artificial intelligence extracts the registration number from the PDF and saves it in a document library in SharePoint for all of the business to access.

In addition to this, we used a similar process to extract and safely store registration numbers from service documents.

This simple process has had significant benefits. The team can now access data instantly, wherever they are, without having to search through a physical filing cabinet (or getting someone to do it for them). What’s more, as the documents don’t need to be handled by multiple people, we’ve helped to reduce the loss and misplacement of files too.

The great news is, this was all done quickly and cost-effectively, and is now helping to pave the way for more automation in the future.

For an in-depth view of this process and further details on the Microsoft Power Platform, you can view the full Cazoo Wholesale case study.

 

Conclusion

Would you like to see how automation could help you gain a competitive advantage? 

By finding the ‘white space’ in your business, we believe you can tap into a whole range of opportunities. With this in mind, adopting the Microsoft Power Platform is a great way to embark on digital transformation, innovating intelligently without great cost or risk.

We can also tailor these technology solutions to your business, making sure each element is shaped around your needs, rather than the other way around.

In fact, innovating in small, focused increments allows you to uncover blockages, overcome challenges and take advantage of new opportunities that can put you one step ahead of your competitors. 

To find out more about the Microsoft Power Platform and how it could help your business, please get in touch.

Industrial Automation

This has been around for some time and has already changed many working environments, with car production lines being the most obvious example where staff have been replaced with robots. Industrial automation generally involves a mechanical device that replaces the need for human involvement, or that works alongside staff to make a task easier or safer to complete.

Business Process Automation (BPA)

BPA sees the use of software to streamline or automate processes. This has also been around for several years, especially in larger businesses. Even in smaller businesses, many will have used some form of process automation if they are running line of business applications such as a CRM or ERP system.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

This does not relate to mechanical robots, but the use of software to undertake a higher level of automation to perform complex tasks that focus on one area, such as order processing.

Intelligent Process Automation (IPA)

This is where automation has been moving to over the last few years and the area that will see significant growth over the next 20 years. IPA does not rely on a pre-defined set of rules like RPA would, it instead makes use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to mimic human interactions and deliver intelligent outcomes. An increasingly commonplace example of this are the chatbots which are increasingly better at mimicking real human interactions.

The reason that we are expecting to see a significant increase in the use of IPA is not just the continued development of the technology, but the accessibility of the technology. It is difficult to think of a prior example where some of the most advanced technological solutions are available on tap, to any business that wants it, on a pay as you go basis. That is the case with IPA though, as the tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, have created incredibly powerful cloud platforms that anyone can access.

Microsoft 365 and its Power Platform is a great example of where businesses have access to intelligent process automation, often as part of an existing subscription. We are helping businesses start to use platforms like Power Automate and Power Apps to increase efficiency within existing processes. These changes are reducing some of the more manual and repetitive tasks that staff are having to do, giving them more time to spend on high value tasks.

The Future of Automation

Over the next decade, we expect to see some of these technologies taking an increasingly prominent role in the workplace. Organisations such as Gartner and PwC have been undertaking research to try to understand what the impact will be.

The good news for the economy is that most research is predicting that automation technologies will generate more jobs. These new jobs created will need a different skill set to those that could be lost. A recent Government briefing highlighted that technological innovation never leads to long-term unemployment, but rather types of employment within professions change as specific tasks evolve and new tasks emerge.

In the early 2020’s, there is expected to be a job displacement of around 3% which will increase as the technology matures. By the 2030’s, 30% of current jobs could be fully automatable.
People with skills in related technologies will certainly be among the beneficiaries in terms of jobs, it is also predicted that the value of soft skills will increase.

Businesses will be increasingly able to work smarter, achieve more and grow faster than they can now. The expectation is that businesses will invest more in their staff, who will spend little time on manual tasks and instead be able to focus on high value tasks.

Emerge Digital are supporting businesses as they go through this transformation and can help your organisation begin to benefit from these technologies.