Leon Calverley

MD Door 4

Where are you on your digital transformation journey?

Digital transformation. That’s a phrase which carries some baggage. It’s bold, it’s confident, it’s almost scary.

But ‘transformation’ defines the era that we’re living in. All around us, the organisations that we know and love are embracing the benefits of ‘digital’, and improving internal and external processes, the way they sell, the way they employ.

We have been able to organise our tax discs online for a few years now. A process that once took (for me, anyway) an entire evening of hunting down documents, and an hour at the post office, is now a 60 second, effortless digital process.

Even organising a new passport is largely done on-screen, with a small matter of taking a seat in a photo booth.

Booking a cab? Those of us in metropolitan areas now straight go to the likes of Uber. This digital evolution gives us more information, better insight and far greater levels of trust.

E-commerce is, perhaps, the peak of the iceberg, visible above the surface. Allowing our customers to buy our products at any time of the day or night, allowing them to browse our range, inspect our specifications and compare our prices makes THEIR lives easier. It allows us to standardise our sales process, hopefully selling more along the way.

Deeper down, transformation is running deeper, as operational departments embrace technology to standardise processes.

HR departments are now turning onto candidate management, with online application systems feeding into centralised databases, speeding up and improving processes for both candidate and recruiter.

Accounts departments are seeing online payments integrating directly with banking systems and accounts packages— less manual entry, more accuracy, more time for strategic work.

The big daddy of them all — ERP (enterprise resource planning) brings an entire business process under the control of a single, powerful platform — spanning all of the above areas and more.

So what does this mean for the typical business in our part of the world? Well, transformation is no less relevant in Lancashire as it is in Westminster. Businesses must have the drive to take these steps, and this drive must be powered by knowledge.

My advice to those businesses who find this step daunting, is to seek some trusted advice. Find out the potential for your business. Establish the minimum steps required to remain competitive. And make a plan. A plan to seize the wealth of opportunity ahead.