Digital Transformation: Turning complexity into prosperity

This article was originally published by Manufacturers’ Monthly.

One of our key advisory offerings is designed to help businesses navigate the complexities of digital transformations and unlock revenue opportunities. We are a trusted adviser to clients seeking audit, tax, advisory and business services across 164 countries and networks.

An advantageous offering for manufacturers is the company’s advisory services that guide clients through challenges, changes, and opportunities. This advisory is crucial in a business’s digital transformation.

During COVID everyone was preserving capital. Now, we have seen a lot more demand and discussion happening in the market. Working to grow your company’s digital advisory offering, our team can help enhance a business’ digital presence to reach your objectives. We help clients understand what digital transformation entails and partner with them to drive these changes. It’s about making sure that the business understands what is holding them back.

This service was born in response to a context where industries, like manufacturing, rely on intangibles to succeed. Supply and the customer base are becoming global, connectedness to what’s happening overseas is a big part of what’s making manufacturers successful. Considering the importance of connectivity, along with data requirements, regulations, and cyber security threats, manufacturers often lack the guidance needed to keep up with technology, resulting in wasted investments.

Digitisation pillars

When you have a static setup, and everything else around you is changing, the only thing that you can do is put on expensive band aids. To ensure manufacturers avoid wasted investment, we target digitisation across five pillars. When advising on digital transformation our most evident advisory pillar is digital strategy consulting, which offers businesses a roadmap that is critical to remaining competitive. This strategy includes planning and executing projects involving data, insights, prototyping, learning, and refinement. We discuss what’s happening in the marketplace, where you are, where you want to go, what investment is required, what options are available, and what value - such as revenue, cost optimisation, or risk minimisation - can be generated.

This planning leads to a board discussion for the approval of our next pillar, technology modernisation. This focuses on consolidating a business’s technology capabilities, addressing its technology gaps and prioritising suitable solutions. The technologies can do whatever you want them to do, but we ensure clients make the right choices on prioritisation and configuration.

This technology-focused pillar connects to the company’s next offering that uses AI to turn data and analytics into insights that reveal market and business trends. With this tech modernisation, you collect good data. An example of this is our partnership with Microsoft, which has proven beneficial for many clients. Microsoft opens a whole new world of analytics that leverage all the AI co-pilot type capabilities to unlock insights. We also provide business technology solutions that tailor each system to meet clients’ specific needs and drive efficiency. When a packaged solution doesn’t make sense for a client, we build a custom solution.

Aside from technology advisory, we offer cyber security services to identify vulnerabilities and provide protection for digital assets. We make sure we secure the technology, it’s a life cycle of support, from strategy to execution.

A future of digitisation in practice

Putting these five pillars together, we successfully helped a pharmaceutical company that was focused on investing ‘as late as possible.’

We helped the company, which grew from $5 million to around $40 or $50 million. Due to this success, the company has extended beyond our digital strategy guidance, to leverage its expertise in technology modernisation and solutions. In aiming to reach $100 million in the next three years, they realised that their systems will hold them back and we are in the process of identifying the right technology for them and vendors to enable it.

We have also serviced a $2 billion global manufacturing organisation working out of Australia using its analytics expertise. We started looking for anomalies within their order patterns of the last three years. By looking at this data, our team were able to increase the forecast accuracy leading to efficient inventory planning, less supply chain wastage and better customer service. Moving into the future, we will continue to diversify its offerings to offer an end-to-end service. We think what we are doing now to support the clients through the whole journey is helping them implement technology.

 None of these transformations are in one straight line, however with our support we can help turn a complex situation into a successful one. Contact our digital team to find out how we can help support your business.