What is digital transformation ?
Digital transformation is nothing but utilizing the digital platforms and tools in the organization thus helping in greater optimization, process improvisation and customer satisfactions.
By digitalization, you can open up to a wide range of possibilities to face the future challenges. With this new era of digital platforms, there is no point in still sticking to the legacy systems. Having a good digital tool to support your business process is a must nowadays. This obviously helps you to adapt to changing demands and achieve customer satisfaction.
How important is digital transformation for the manufacturing industry ?
With more business models emerging among every industry, the small and medium sized businesses should implement significant changes to the system to remain competitive. The manufacturing operations undergo many complexities and the old excel sheets or accounting tools are no more effective in facing the business challenges.
Manufacturing is the backbone of the global economy and highly reliable on supply and demand. It is important to establish accurate forecasting methods that could support and maintain a sustainable demand flow. As the manufacturing production floor is sequential and each job depends on the other. Any mistake at one end will be carried till the finished goods and tagged as defective product. This totally affects the efficiency of the production. Hence it is evident that a manufacturing industry must be accurately monitored for its quality, quantity and running time. A smart factory necessitates those factors and maintains a safe environment to work with.
ERP and Digital transformation :
ERP software is one of those powerful digital platforms that helps businesses achieve efficiency. ERP can transform your business digitally with its robust features and number of modules. It is a software tool with a single database that holds all the departments and its functions together at one place. Thus easily accessible, no duplicates, more optimized and enhanced security in data.
Manufacturing industry is unique in nature and requires a modern solution that transfers the processes with the best automation and innovation. An industry specific ERP software tool has all the necessary modules and features helping manufacturing to increase production and quality.
Why should you go for digital transformation ?
After deploying the right ERP for your business and transforming all the manufacturing operations as digital, you can achieve the following benefits.
- Customer satisfaction – With digital tools, you can better understand your customer’s changing needs, gain customer loyalty, communicate with them on the go, keeping them updated about their order, providing on time and quality delivery, etc. all these results in greater customer satisfaction.
- Better productivity – As we already said the shop floor does a sequential job and relies on the previous process. Once the data has been fed to the system and starts tracking your real time data then you could innovate all your process flow. Maintain better machine maintenance hence better utilization of machines resulting in good productivity.
- Cost reduction – Obviously with more efficiency and optimized resources with balanced inventory will create effective cost management.
- Process enhancement – The main achievement through digital transformation is proper communication between the departments. The employees work under the same page and hence duplication is greatly reduced.
- Strategy – Once all the data is visually represented then you get to better understand the current strategy and pave the way for new ideas on areas of improvement.
How to start your digital transformation with ERP ?
Transforming your business process completely into a digital platform is not an easy task. It needs much involvement, strategic thinking and a clear cut plan before starting the digitalization. The following steps explain to you the procedure for digital transformation.
- Create a strategy – One should look deep into the current system, find out the areas for improvements, cut down the longer sequence and improve the work cycle. Form a team to have a healthy conversation about change management. Come to a conclusion on a strategy that will give definite results once the transformation is done.
- Deployment plan – Software implementation is where the total probability of success and failure lies. To avoid major disruption, this phase must be given greater focus. You can go with one module at a time and one location at a time. By this way you can learn and correct from the mistakes.
- Process update – It is no use in having the same old process while undergoing a major update. Try more ways to standardize the procedures and automate the functions.
- Organize your data – The legacy system you deal with might have a junk of data that you may no longer need for your business. It is important to have a plan on cleaning all this data. The unwanted information that you feed to the system will affect the accuracy of the future predictive analytics.
- Improve customer experience – This modern ERP software tool has a separate module for CRM to improve customer service. Hence coming up with a plan to better serve the customers with various strategies will create a good experience.
- Transform your employees – The final and most crucial phase is to train all your employees. You need to educate them about the digital transformation and how beneficial it is to the business. Next thing to train well on the software. In order to utilize the complete benefits of ERP it is essential to give training to the employees who are going to work on it.
The emerging technologies are clearly raising the business standards. It is the duty of business owners to choose the right platform and right software tool. This is obviously a challenging task but we as a solution provider would like to help you make the right choice.
