DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Digital Transformation is the application of digital technology into all aspects of your business. It fundamentally transforms how your organisation creates and delivers values to your customers.

Despite the hype about Digital Transformation, most companies are still in the very early phases of digitalisation. According to a 2016 report from analyst firm Forrester, only 11 per cent of companies surveyed are digitally mature. Failed or cancelled digital projects are commonplace and have cost companies dearly. 

With this 7-step road map to Digital Transformation, you should be able to start the digitalisation journey right away.

Step 1 – Securing the C-Suite’s Commitment

Digital Transformation should be driven by an organisation-wide effort. Therefore, the buck stops with the CEO.

The CEO alone, however, cannot lead the charge. The execution of Digital Transformation needs buy-in and commitment from other members of the C-suite.

Step 2 – Setting a Digital Vision and Strategy

As technology is increasingly commoditised, it’s the strategy, not technology, that will determine whether your Digital Transformation is a success.

Before a digital strategy is set, it is crucial to conduct a strategic review of the industry. It should be able to spot new business models that are potentially disruptive.

Regardless of the scope of your digital strategy, don’t forget to look beyond your industry for breakthrough ideas. Disruptions can come from unexpected directions.

Step 3 - Acquiring Digital Capabilities

Building your own digital capabilities does not have to be prohibitively expensive, especially for small and mid-sized enterprises. Digital disruptions are levelling the playing field. Companies, regardless of their sizes, now belong to interconnected ecosystems, and can access the same on-demand, inexpensive capabilities and resources. And when your business can find its place in these ecosystems, the possibilities are endless.

Step 4 – Communication

The digital vision and strategy then need to be sold to employees and other key stakeholders. Companies can also utilise other familiar tools, corporate vision and mission statements, and come up with their digital vision and mission statements.

Step 5 – Gaining Traction with Lighthouse Projects

Rather than embark on an all-in, high-stakes digitalisation project, it would be best if you aimed for quick wins with lighthouse projects that can quickly yield payoffs to secure support from key stakeholders and maximise the overall transformation’s prospects for success.

Step 6 - Addressing the Talent Gap

In addition to digital technologies, the execution of a digital strategy requires the right people with the right skill sets. You can either bring new digital skills into the company via recruitment or focus on the development of current employees.

Step 7 - Adopting a New Operating Model

The last step will make sure the transformation will be moved from the margins to the mainstream of your business.

The building blocks of this new operating model are Digital Culture and cross-functional teams.

You can find more detailed information about these seven steps here.

Digital Transformation is a lot more than the adoption of new technologies. It is about fundamentally changing how an organisation operates. As such, the people and cultural aspects of Digital Transformation cannot be overlooked.

Additionally, Digital Transformation is as much finance-driven as it is technology-driven. The CFOs’ role and vision in the entire Digital journey are highly critical. A digital CFO will be responsible for the evaluation of the cost-effectiveness and adding value in the digital processes, thus, helps enlarge the organisation scale. Learn more about the role of the CFOs in Digital Transformation.

It is more critical now than ever to create a personalised experience for travellers to improve both their satisfaction and loyalty.

The reason for the Hospitality industry to offer personalisation is mainly due to guests today are constantly bombarded with information, deals, promotions from hotels, online travel agencies (OTAs), Airbnb and other similar sharing platforms.

Furthermore, tech giants Amazon, Google, and Netflix have pioneered the era of personalisation, making it the new normal for consumer service industries.

Young travellers today, specifically the Millennials, prefer a seamless travel experience from A to Z, made according to their preferences.

Cloud-first, mobile-first

Approximately half of the global online hotel bookings are preceded by a click on a mobile device. Plus, 94% of travellers utilise whatever electronic devices in possession (mobile, tablet, computer) to plan for their trips.

What travellers want is convenience. It is inevitable for tables not to adopt a mobile-first, cloud-first approach.

But where to begin? Start with modernising your Property Management Software (PMS) as they are the backbone of hotel operations.

Modern PMS empowers the front office staff and the management to solve a wide array of issues, mainly:

• Integration with third-party applications: revenue management, financial management, Big Data handling, to name a few. These solutions, if not added in the Cloud PMS, should have industry-specific functions and automation to eliminate silos.
• Guest experience enhancement: engage with both past and current guests using automation, chatbots, and hotel's mobile apps.
• Issues with data: never let overbooking becomes an issue with in-the-now information across all booking channels.
• Ability to scale up or down based on seasons: a highly scalable PMS would save you lots of time, effort, and not to mention resources.

Internet of Things (IoT)

IoT can make or break your "personalisation game,” differentiate your hotel from the competitors. Many hotels have already implemented some forms of IoT to centrally monitor guest rooms condition (temperature, HVAC systems, TVs, Wi-Fi).

IoT can also help hoteliers to reduce maintenance costs through predictive analytics to predict a time when equipment might experience issues or break down.

IoT can be applied to inventory management to help track and manage item by item via remote scanners or other high-tech devices, thus, freeing the hotel staff for other demanding tasks.

Blockchain

Hospitality operations typically create complex procedures as there are multiple parties involved. Since blockchain is encrypted, it removes the middleman in transactions, ensures data stays valid, uncorrupted.

There are various ways to apply blockchain into Hospitality beyond the so-called cryptocurrency.

For example, blockchain can solve the independent loyalty program problem by creating a multi-brand coalition partnership platform, an eco-system for instant and real-time view of customer purchases and activities.

Secondly, blockchain combines with IoT can elevate the customer experience, digging deeper into customer behaviour analysis, and equip hoteliers with insights for crucial decisions.

Lastly, blockchain can be applied in supply chain management to manage vendors, inventory, and payment more efficiently. And let's not forget smart contracts, one of the fundamental applications of blockchain which allow the automated verification of relevant business rules. Smart contracts help hotels to maintain the lowest price for a specific item in the order from all participating vendors/ suppliers.

Manufacturers are among those who stand to benefit the most from Digital Transformation. Emerging technologies open up new opportunities to reinvent the ways products are made and distributed to the market.

There are nine steps manufacturers need to take in their journey to digitalisation.

1. Clarify the missions for your business
2. Invest in creativity factors
3. Choose your business models
4. Move to data-based decision making
5. Develop co-innovation with partners
6. Forming cross-functional teams to execute ideas
7. Expand service offerings and customer engagement
8. Enhance the supply chain and connected networks
9. Keep track of your equipment

You can find more detailed information about these nine steps here.

Samsung

The Samsung Cloud Print platform provides mobile cloud printing capabilities to office users and mobile workers. The application aims to take advantage of the current cloud services and mobile printing trend.

Samsung chose to partner with Amazon due to their extensive expertise in automating deployment and their selection of hybrid, robust cloud infrastructures that would bring substantial benefits for Samsung, faster application performance, auto-scaling, ability to self-serve, security… to name a few. All these could subsequently help Samsung in building high-performance design at an extensively lower overall cost.

Read the full story here.

Citrix Systems

Citrix Systems is a multinational software company that aims at virtualising applications, primarily focused on mobile workstyles of more than 130,000 organisations worldwide, including many in Fortune Global 500 enterprises.

Citrix faced a considerable data challenge that had taken them tons of time and loads of cumbersome, manual steps to analyse the acquired data amount.

In the past, Citrix had to compile hundreds of spreadsheets and wrangled them for analysis. The process took forever to finish, and by the time it was done, the data was already out of date.

The key differentiators that make Birst cloud BI stands were the ease of implementation, ease of maintenance, and data model manipulation.

“Birst was a game-changer for us. We went live in less than 90 days with minimal involvement from IT and planned to have 2000 users up and running shortly," said Fred Tiso, Citrix’s vice president.

Read the full story here.

Infor SunSystems 6.4, the latest update of the venerable accounting system, represents a quantum leap in enterprise software. The newest version is packed full of innovative capabilities, which can be the catalyst for your business’ digital transformation.

Boosted User Productivity

User productivity is Infor SunSystems 6.4's core focus, defined by several critical factors, i.e., user experience, collaboration, automated workflows, and access to supporting documents.

SunSystems 6.4 offers consumer-grade “look & feel,” an experience similar to what users enjoy when they are using consumer applications, such as mobile apps and social networks.

More important, SunSystems 6.4 now allows users to interact with others using functions, chat boxes, tags, buttons similar to popular social networks.

Document management also becomes an easy task with the latest update via Infor Document Management, an integral part of the underlying software operating system Infor OS.

Automation

Infor SunSystems 6.4 offers users access to Coleman AI, an artificial intelligence engine developed to automate and run things in the background for end-users.

Coleman AI can be activated using chat-based queries to process typical financial processes and inquiries.

Seamless Integration

Infor OS allows for seamless integration between your SunSystems and other applications from Infor or other third-party vendors. Users can work either on-premises, in the cloud, or both.

With this integration, Infor is capable of keeping track of all of the information in a secure so-called “data lake.” Hence, users can connect all enterprise data to an advanced analytics application or do enterprise search.