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USING TECHNOLOGY TO ACCELERATE BUSINESS PERFORMANCE

The last three months have seen a number of changes in customer and consumer behaviour that are opportunities for business to improve profitability and accelerate growth.  For example, a large wine retailing business is now doing 140% of its volumes with 40% less people by moving its business to 100% online.  Sainsburys recently stated ‘we spent 25 years getting to 7% on line business, and then in 6 weeks we have doubled that’.  Neither businesses will simply return to the status quo.

There are a number of areas of opportunity

  • Improving Employee Productivity by deploying remote working technologies to allow more flexibility in terms of place of work.  The Zoom generation is now with us, although the need for human interaction has certainly not gone away altogether.  There are also some excellent tools available to support virtual workshops with electronic post it notes. The human dimensions are complex and organisations will need to take these as seriously as the technology challenges – discipline, preparation and rules are vital.
  • Optimising B2B Sales & Marketing through the use of widely available technologies to digitally enable their sales & marketing function, and customers will expect this.  Using CRM tools integrated with web technologies a salesperson can run campaigns, engage stakeholders and manage sales pipelines very effectively – and as importantly use these tools to measure the progress and effectiveness of the activities. These toolkits must be integrated (at least to an extent) otherwise the sales process becomes disjointed and messaging to potential customers inconsistent.
  • Increasing B2C Volumes by revamping the design of the websites and also revisiting their supply chains.  A simple problem that needs to be fixed is that a B2C organisation has many thousands, if not millions, of customers whereas a traditional B2B (with a similar revenue) may only have 100s.  That has implications on data management and data volumes (for example invoice volumes) that need to be managed very efficiently.

All sectors will be impacted in the post COVID world and will need to evolve their business model.  Some, for example Healthcare, will see dramatic changes (cramped waiting rooms or outpatient departments must be a thing of the past).  Manufacturing environments may need to monitor and enforce social distancing and there are some very interesting Internet Of Things / Bluetooth solutions being developed and rolled out to support this.

The conclusion is that there are some real opportunities for digital transformation as businesses recover, with technology and people at the heart of this. At EMC we have the expertise in both technology and operating models and can help you through these challenges.

 

Tony Barsham

T: 01273 945984

M: 07956 297554

E: Tony.barsham@emcltd.co.uk

 

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