Phase 3:
Optimized for success
If market conditions have changed since your innovation rollout, you likely have new business needs that require adjustments to your systems, processes and data foundation. A common challenge at this stage is not knowing how to adapt the technology to address new business needs. You may also lack flexibility in the workflows or IT infrastructure.
During this part of the digital transformation process, your goal is to optimize your operations across the enterprise, extending workflows to external points of contact outside your company. Doing so allows you to support initiatives such as:
Customer portals or self-service interfaces
Supplier integration
Direct feeds to internal production machines/schedules from customers or sales
Data as a service and other automations for tasks such as ERP inventory replacement
Third-party enrichments
With this level of optimization, a centralized data foundation is essential. Without one, you are likely to run into data issues such as difficulty when importing new data sets, validating data before it is allowed into the ecosystem, or matching, linking and merging data sets. You may also have concerns about trusting automation that’s using outside data.
Like many manufacturers, you’re increasingly under pressure to meet your partners’ and stakeholders’ sustainability and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) requirements. To make sustainability and ESG work for your company, you’ll want to avoid any misalignment between your internal business goals and the company’s ideal ESG goals. It’s also important to ensure you have data capabilities in place that will enable you to track and prove your ESG score.
Just getting started
On the road to transformation
You have become aware of innovative technology that offers new opportunities for your products and services. While the potential value of the initiative is significant, you’re concerned about scalability and whether you can support a seamless inflow/outflow of data to suppliers, customers, online content, etc.
A limited data foundation, workarounds, or postponed upgrades that have put you behind on functionality can fuel these concerns. Depending on your data capabilities, you may also have problems measuring the metrics you want to track.
