Another frequent goal of a digital strategy is to transform manual business processes to a digitised form. Digitising a business process is about more than just ‘going paperless’ or communicating with your team online.
It means applying the capabilities of digital technology to every aspect of that process. This enables a wide range of benefits, such as process acceleration, business efficiencies, greater visibility, advanced automation and new data integrations.
You first need to fully understand the process in question—because you can’t transform what is not properly understood.
Process mapping is the act of documenting each step in a process, and the flow of information between these steps—and then representing this in a clear visual form.
Then you can identify which steps and information flows have not yet been fully digitised. These may still involve paper documents or manual data entry.
Converting the entire process to a digital form enables immediate advantages in terms of your ability to accelerate actions and search for information— but the transformation doesn’t stop there.
Next, with the whole process digitised, you can use automation technology to remove manual tasks wherever possible—with dramatic improvements to speed and efficiency.
The transformation process is not a one-off change. Once in a digital form, the process becomes easier to adjust and refine—enabling an iterative cycle of business improvement.
When processes are digital, you can also use cloud computing to improve their cost-efficiency, scalability and agility.
Your digital strategy can do more than digitising existing ways of working. You can also completely reinvent business processes—or create entirely new ones that were not previously possible.
