Even though the use of digital tools has increased due to the pandemic, the progress of the digital transformation in the German economy leaves a lot to be desired. Despite higher levels of digital maturity, many potentials remain untapped - but that doesn't have to be the case. Today's blog post "How to make digitalization a success in your company" shows you how you can easily get started with digitalization.

Digitize - but how?

A survey conducted as part of the IW Future Panel revealed that two thirds of German companies consider digitalization to be of very high strategic importance over the next five years. At the same time, however, we also know that most companies are only just beginning to digitize their products, processes and business models.

The digitalization of the economy is a task that not only requires a high level of expertise, but also investment. Many companies are also confronted with other obstacles of a legal, technical and economic nature:

• gray areas under data protection law 
• Lack of legally compliant anonymization of personal data
  
• Concern about unauthorized access to data by third parties
  
• Lack of technical protection
  
• Lack of specialists
  
• Concerns about business success (lack of marketplaces)
  
• Hurdles under competition or antitrust law
  

The state could at least help companies with the legal obstacles. New or precise laws and regulations or concrete support in their application would be an enormous relief.

But what about the other points? How can a company digitize if it doesn't know where to start?

Digital processes

The digitalization of processes is proving to be one of the most important pillars. Analogue and manual processes are automated and digitalized.

Digital processes increase the efficiency of the business model, make workflows less error-prone and free up valuable resources, for example in the form of your employees' working time. Digital processes are therefore a top priority for many companies. Success at this level is also easy to measure, plan and calculate.

It is important for your company to understand that not every business process is given top priority when it comes to digitalization. As a first step, it helps to identify the most essential processes - perhaps also those that cause the greatest costs. Here are a few areas you can use as a guide:

• Administration (e.g. master data or contracts) 
• Supplier and customer portal
  
• Complaint management
  
• Employee onboarding
  
• Internal payroll accounting & sick notes
  

All of these examples can be wonderfully digitized, but do not have to be the priority in your day-to-day business. The personal business relevance of the process determines the order in which you should tackle the whole thing. 

How digitalization succeeds

Before integrating various tools and software into your daily operations, you first need to think about what exactly you expect from this technology. However, you may be in a hurry to move forward with your digital transformation as quickly as possible, as your market niche is highly competitive and more and more competitors are going digital. Here are some steps for you to go through during your research and planning phase:

• Identify important processes: Look at your daily processes and consider how they are linked and interact with each other. Prioritize processes that play an important role.
• Research: Take a close look at what your competitors do better on a day-to-day basis. What have your competitors already digitized?
  
• Set goals to measure yourself against later: Once you have identified important processes that you would like to digitize, the next step is to set specific and realistic goals to be achieved with digitization. 
  
• Select the right employees: You need to build a productive team of employees internally that you can trust. Ideally, these should be outstanding members from the departments you want to digitize.
• Consult experts: Companies going through digitization rely on help from experts to avoid mistakes in the first place and get important input from the outside.
  
• Obtain feedback: In most cases, people do not accept change without further ado. Even if digitalization brings many benefits, there is a chance that some of your customers and employees will not accept it immediately. For this reason, it is important to get feedback from both groups during the process.
  

If you would also like to optimize your business processes and are looking for the right partner to implement your ideas: newdirection GmbH is at your disposal with all its software expertise. If you have any questions or specific concerns, please feel free to contact us directly.