6-minute video
When you invest in cloud technology, it's time to take a hard look at your back office business processes.
Technology won’t fix bad business processes. It will only make them more costly. So before you roll out a back office digital transformation, it’s important to take a hard look at your operations.
In this short video, we discuss ways to evaluate and refine your workflows to make the most of investments in cloud-based business platforms.
This episode continues our series of discussions around the 10 Best Practices for Digital Transformation.
Have a question you’d like answered?
Let us know in the comments below, and we’ll talk through it on a future episode!
What's the ROI? Just six months after implementing their digital transformation efforts, luxury textile manufacturer Matouk saw a 233% return on their investments.
Transcript: Thinking about moving to a cloud-based manufacturing platform? Don’t waste your time or money.
Jessica: Hi, and thanks for joining us for another Q&A Friday, a regular series where we chat about issues facing manufacturing companies in the new world of Industry 4.0. I'm Jessica Vodden, a team member here at Moun ain Point, and I'm joined by Andrew Rieser, our President and Co-founder. Hey, Andrew.
Andrew: Hey, Jess.
Jessica: Hey, so today, we are breaking down step five of our 10-step guide to managing a digital transformation project. For those of you that have been following along on our blog, we have a 10 Best Practices infographic that outlines key considerations for managing digital transformation efforts in your company, and we're discussing each of those one by one to really dig into the issues. Step five is evaluating and aligning your business processes, and one of the things that I think is really challenging for companies is setting straightforward business processes that are repeatable, but also flexible enough to address emerging issues, and then balancing that with not just changing your process every time a unique situation comes up. So Andrew, how do you go about doing that and what's involved?
Andrew: I think that whether it's in business or everyday life, the path of least resistance is always the easiest one to follow, and for organizations that are rapidly growing or that are evolving as their business evolves, it's very common for business processes and documentation and really thinking about the value that this process should be providing falls by the wayside. It's usually point solutions and point problems and a set period of time are made ad hoc or have minimum discussion around the bigger picture just to solve that particular challenge or issue, and update that process accordingly. So I think this is where this spider web of processes ultimately evolves, and taking a step back and re-baselining things and re-looking at your core processes, I think, is absolutely necessary. We talked about that in our previous Q&A discussions about how to measure and really baseline the organization, and I think this is a great starting point is to baseline your existing business processes so that you can then identify what the future state needs to look like, and start having these hard conversations that typically get swept under the rug just to move things forward.
Jessica: Yeah, so one of the things that we often advise people not to do is to just transfer, for example, their paper-based processes into digital form, right? This is a chance to really revisit what you're doing and figure out if it makes sense for your organization. How often do you think, beyond just whenever you're undertaking this digital transformation effort, how often should companies really be taking a look at their business processes and what kind of process should be in place for making adjustments there and keeping things fluid and shifting with the times?
Andrew: Yeah, so we've talked about new roles that are coming to fruition over the past decade, and I think a digital transformation value-add role is coming to the forefront more and more as a part of these engagements that we're starting to get into. A lot of times, people either are internally promoted or an outside person is brought in to almost be that process improvement consultant to really go around to all aspects of the business and do what we're talking about, so re-level set things, create that baseline of where the business currently is, so that you can identify the low-hanging fruit in the process improvement changes to make the business better. So we're definitely seeing that shift in those types of roles being established in these organizations, and reiterate back on your point of now's the opportune time to reinvent these processes and re-establish a new way of how to do them, not to buy a bright new shiny tool or system and replicate the same bad processes and that new expensive tool.
Jessica: Yep, absolutely, and I think our previous conversations on setting KPIs, as you mentioned, are really relevant here because it helps you figure out why you're doing something, right? And if you can't tie a process or an activity that you're doing on a regular basis back to one of your end goals, I think it's a really good time to evaluate why you're even doing it in the first place or how it could be better aligned.
Andrew: I think that's a great point. I think that the data never lies. I like using that phrase a lot. So, a lot of what we talk about revolves around data and how to measure data and the organizational value that data brings, and oftentimes, people let the emotional or the how they perceive things come into play as it relates to these business processes, but when you really uncover the data and dive into it a little bit deeper and peel back the onion, you often find that that's really not the case, that the data says otherwise.
Jessica: Yep, absolutely. Well, Andrew, thank you as always. I really enjoy these conversations. For those of you out there listening, if you have a question that you'd like us to answer in a future episode or an issue you'd like us to tackle, please let us know. We'd also love to hear your ideas. If you have best practices that you'd like to share. We're always happy to hear them. You can hit us up on Facebook, on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, via email, our website, we're everywhere, so definitely love to hear from you, and Andrew, thanks again. Happy Friday.
Andrew: You, too. Thank you.
What's the ROI? Just six months after implementing their digital transformation efforts, luxury textile manufacturer Matouk saw a 233% return on their investments.