Making Digital Transformation Work for Your Business

The pandemic has accelerated digitalisation and it has become critical for all businesses, large or small, to undergo digital transformation to remain relevant and continue to succeed.

Here are ways highlighted by industry leaders on how your company can identify digitalisation priorities, get started on your digital transformation journey, and adopt best practices from others’ success stories.

Identify Your Digitalisation Priorities

Firstly, digital transformation entails the use of digital technology to transform your business in three key aspects: the way you engage your customers, the way your business operates, and the way you compete with other businesses.

Ms Wynthia Goh, head of NEXT Digital, NCS Pte Ltd, shared that there are three main digital transformations:

Changes in your offering of products and services to extend services and incremental revenue
Changes in your business and operating model to gain cost efficiency and productivity
Changes in both product offering and operating model to grow new businesses and revenue

Critically, as resources and time are not unlimited, you need to identify the key problems to be solved in your business. This can be done through finding potential digital transformation areas and gathering feedback from customers, employees and competitors:

Customers: What has changed in your customers’ expectations? Are there new patterns in their consumer behaviour? Collect feedback from your customers on public channels, direct customer service agents or frontline staff.
Employees: What are their new needs in order to work remotely or serve customers? How can you enable them to do their jobs better? Reach out to your employees to find out impediments to their work, or even crowdsource suggestions and solutions.
Competitors: What are your competitors (both old and new) doing better than you to solve the same problems? What can we learn from digital native companies, as well as other industries and sectors? Look to the competition to see where they are going.

Get Started on Your Digital Transformation Journey

Start planning your Digital Transformation Roadmap. There are three main sections of digitalisation:

Service-Led: This impacts external interactions with customers, partners or suppliers. It takes the form of external interfacing systems and applications such as digital customer services, self-service platforms, user experience or partner management. It can lead to increase in customer satisfaction, service quality, revenue growth or even new revenue streams.
Operations-Led: This supports internal users of your company. They include intelligent business functions (HR, Finance, Procurement) or Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps). It can result in cost optimisation, efficiency and productivity.
Digital-Core: This refers to improving the core infrastructure that supports Service-Led and Operations-Led services, thus benefiting both internal and external users. Some examples include cloud strategy execution and app modernisation, and service migration to the Cloud.

For support on your digitalisation journey, you can leverage existing government programmes such as IMDA SMEs Go Digital and the Digital Leaders Programme.

Adopt Best Practices from Success Stories

Turning towards successful SME digitalisation stories, X-Inc Pte Ltd is one such business which overcame the challenges of digital transformation over the years. It stated as a trading and food distribution family business in the 1930s. The third-generation owner Ms Nichol Ng, joined in 2002 and began the company’s modernisation and business sustainability process.

At that time, the food services industry was still using manual processes. Ms Ng implemented their first Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to collect customer orders. She also incorporated both a toll-free hotline and fax number for customers who could not completely convert to digital ordering.

Other digital initiatives that X-Inc implemented are:

E-commerce online ordering platform both for businesses and consumers
Data analytics and reporting tools
Integrated security platforms to protect their data
Cloud-based logistics and fleet management system
HR digital transformation and employee self-service platform
Facial recognition security, cleaning robots, automated storage and retrieval, and building management systems in their new physical building
Collaboration with IBM Food Trust to devise an integrated platform on blockchain in order to file and retrieve food safety documents
Developing an Artificial Intelligence tool that can read handwritten text on invoices
Incorporating Augmented Reality into their printed product catalogues

At the end of the day, Ms Ng reflects that digitalisation is an inevitable and necessary step to take for business continuity and resiliency. It is critical to the success of your digital transformation journey to adopt a digital-first mentality, be prepared to encounter changes and challenges along the way, drive the initiatives in collaboration with your team, and keep people at the core of the change.

Explore Partnerships with Other Tech Companies

Within the industry of digital solutions providers, there are not many large local industry players, but many small vendors from an investor’s perspective. Mr Gerald Chiu, Partner, Dymon Asia Private Equity, recommended that it is the right time for small service providers to explore partnerships and mergers with other tech companies. Whether it is through pooling strengths with companies with similar expertise, or providing contrasting and complementary services, there is much to gain from scaling up. With support coming from both customers and government programmes, the time is ripe for the emergence of a strong digital transformation challenger.

Interested to find potential partners as a technology vendor? You can check out SGTech’s TechPartner, a complimentary service exclusively for SGTech members which brings together technology vendors to collaborate and establish new partnerships.

To conclude, the journey of digital transformation is an ongoing and long-term process – and every journey begins with a single step. With these insights and best practices from industry experts, start taking the first steps in planning your digitalisation roadmap for the success of your company.

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Join SGTech Digital Transformation Chapter

SGTech’s Digital Transformation Chapter gathers like-minded companies with various specialities, with the common aim of accelerating innovation to drive the successful digital transformation of Singapore businesses.

Please contact [email protected] if you'd like to find out more about the Chapter.