Digital transformation
The five axes of digital transformation
Why the growth of Senegalese SMEs runs through digital, and the five projects to run, in order.
Translated from the French original. The screenshots show Odoo in French, as our Senegalese clients use it.
Introduction
The survival and future growth of Senegalese companies depend in large part on how well they master digital. With the current shift in government policy, the informal economy is being shaken up. Some SMEs have no access to public contracts, because the state requires them to be in order socially and fiscally before awarding one. But being in order requires modern tools: to work out contributions in time, to file VAT returns when they are due, and to produce the financial statements the companies act demands.
Beyond that compliance, soon unavoidable, knowing your company's financial position in real time — rather than waiting months for the result of documents keyed in by an outside accounting firm — is becoming a necessity too. The agile management an unstable economy imposes means taking the right decisions and correcting course within ever shorter delays, before it is too late.
Poor cash forecasts, slackness in collecting from bad payers, or simply not knowing when compulsory contributions fall due, can quickly put a company at risk, financially or legally.
The important questions about the purpose of digital transformation have to be asked:
Steering the organisation better?
Shortening delivery times?
Keeping a closer eye on the work done?
Raising the quality of the products or services sold?
Cutting costs and overheads by tracking them more precisely?
Helping staff be more effective by saving them time?
To answer all of these, there are now digital management and steering tools — ERPs — that let a manager shorten the time to a decision, thanks to reliable information arriving in real time, before the accounting entries are even posted.
To carry out their digital transformation in the best conditions, companies must choose a good tool, such as Odoo, already proven in more than 50,000 organisations and with over 12,000,000 users worldwide.
Management must also be supported by people experienced in putting such tools in place. But beyond deploying the tool, changes have to be made within the organisation itself for the transformation to succeed.
The five axes of digital transformation
To stop this change becoming a complicated affair, the transformation needs a strategy of its own. Companies therefore have to act on five broad axes, often in parallel.
Transforming the company's IT strategy
More and more of the companies that succeed are technology companies, run by people keen on technology. Digital transformation puts information technology at the heart of company strategy: being better informed, and faster, so as to take the best decisions just in time. The key to a good digital strategy is mastering the flows of information that circulate between suppliers and partners, employees and clients.
This approach reduces operating expenditure, because computing saves precious time and brings efficiency. It may even transform the business outright. All the same, multiplying systems or packages in good faith is a mistake: information then gets scattered, hard to consolidate, and sometimes stranded in systems that cannot talk to each other.
Aligning the whole company, and every technology used inside it, on a single unified model makes the entire value chain more effective.
No more updating Excel spreadsheets, no more files sent as attachments, no more duplicates or import-export problems and the errors they bring. At the centre of management and follow-up there will be one tool, around which everyone gathers to perform.
Realigning business operations
Transforming business processes and adopting new ways of working — which mean agility and rising skills — play an essential part in that success.
What are the main needs of your clients and of your staff, and how can digital processes answer them?
Starting from those questions lets you build better processes at every level — whether that means improving client service through better use of data, putting analytic accounting in place to get a clearer view of operating costs or of a project's profitability, moving strategic services to the cloud for better security, or digitising the supply chain and quality control in manufacturing.
Making information technology available to as many people as possible
At a time when clients are more demanding and the pace of change is quickening, new ways of working have to be established and tied to modern technical capability. But professional solutions are not free.
When it comes to directing their technology investment, most companies take sub-optimal decisions. They hesitate to invest in a digital solution that may cost a good deal, and sometimes doubt the efficiency it will bring. And buying software is not enough: the change and the take-up have to be managed too, with an experienced partner to lean on throughout the transformation. It all comes down to accepting change and innovation. A successful digital transformation calls for a radically different approach: one where technology is within reach and the teams are involved and responsive.
Building an evolving technical foundation, step by step
Digital transformation does not happen in one phase. It matters not to try to do everything at once. The meal has to stay digestible — better to spread it over several small dishes, so the effort stays within reach. The time needed to adapt to and absorb new ways of working has to be allowed for.
Taking up the new tools should happen workflow by workflow, department by department, one at a time. A modular approach means change that is gradual and lasting. Finally, it is essential to stay centred on the client's needs. Digital transformation is not solely about steering the organisation better: it must reach the quality of the services or products sold to the client, and make staff more effective. It answers several complementary aims at once. Digital transformation must optimise the value chain built inside the organisation.
Managing change on the human resources side
Digital transformation touches every aspect of a company's activity. For it to work, the workforce must be trained in digital and must have the leadership's support. Staff need to feel how much weight is given to this shift, through the involvement of general management. They also need a culture aligned with the technologies to be adopted, and with the best way of fitting them into daily work. HR must overcome inertia through awareness and support. It will have to fight working habits that are so hard to give up. The ERP will have to fit the company's business processes — but sometimes it will be for the company to fit the proven way its software works. It will have to learn to work differently. Otherwise the change will not be felt.
What should the work of the future look like?
How should roles and responsibilities evolve around the new digital solution?
How can technology improve the sharing of knowledge, and collaboration?
How do you train the managers too?
And those who think they have nothing left to learn?
If technology sets staff new challenges, it can also meet a great many of them.
In the age of artificial intelligence, and of machines taking over certain human tasks, the traditional company that does not question itself and prepare for the future through new technology puts itself at risk. Organisations that do not adapt to a changing environment are said to decline, then die, smothered by competition.
Such is the hard law of economic battle. The struggle for life.
