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If there was ever a time to fast-track the digital transformation (DT) of an organization, 2021 is that year. The events of 2020 taught business leaders that you can’t muscle business forward by sticking with the old tools, processes, and thinking. The world sped past that and customers expect more.
But what does digital transformation look like? Your path depends on your unique business, industry, and goals as these digital transformation examples below illustrate.
What is digital transformation in simple words?
Digital transformation is using digital technology to evolve or create new business processes so that the business runs and serves its customers better. This may include creating a mobile app for customers to place and track orders. Or it may be giving your sales team cloud-based tools so they can access customer information and download sales material from anywhere.
But digital transformation isn’t just about technology. Successful digital transformation requires a strategy that addresses the organization’s culture, how its employees think, how it engages with customers, and how it runs.
Examples of digital transformation by vertical
These examples are from large companies and are not meant to be prescriptive. Every business’s journey is different so consider using these digital transformation examples as inspiration and ideas to propel your journey.
Automotive
BMW
BMW has a goal to provide the best customer experience in the premium automotive sector. They built upon the contact-free sales process developed in 2020 during the pandemic. Over the next few years, the company is committing more money to digitize its sales and marketing operation, so that sales staff in more than 60 countries can sell BMW and Mini vehicles from anywhere. Investments in digital technology will enable customers to:
- Configure a BMW, buy it, and have it delivered to their home in one seamless experience.
- Post-purchase digitally upgrades their BMW with features such as driver assistance systems and light and sound packages. They can even digitally configure their car’s suspension setup—no mechanic needed.
- Use their mobile phone as a car key and integrate Amazon Alexa with their car.
Porsche
Porsche is transforming its business model through digitization by announcing it intends to become a software-enabled, data-driven automotive tech player. Digital transformation requires having a lot of data and analyzing it accurately to make the right decisions. Porsche is adept at collecting data from everywhere: cars, operations, sales—but it’s siloed. They recognize that to innovate faster, it must free data so that it’s easily shared, used, and distributed across the entire organization and improves collaboration. To achieve this, Porsche had to update processes and promote a new mindset company-wide. To that end, they:
Retail
Best Buy
Physical retail stores may seem doomed as customers move more of their shopping online, but Best Buy is staying in the game by providing customers with multiple options for how, when, and where they shop.
Leveling up customer experience for the digital age required investing in their people and changing how they use stores. Some of their changes include:
- Using stores more for online fulfillment than in-person retail sales.
- Reskilling/upskilling employees to work in digital-friendly functions, such as training in-store customer associates to serve customers via phone and online chat.
- Offering more customer convenience options through the Best Buy mobile app, such as scheduling an appointment to pick up orders.
Target
It’s easy to assume that Target’s 1,900 stores will become less relevant in the digital age. But Target made it a competitive advantage by connecting a customer’s digital experience to Target’s physical stores.
In the U.S., most stores are within 10 miles of most of Target’s consumers, so the retailer can offer the fastest and easiest digital fulfillment in retail. Some of their efforts include:
- Offering multiple pickup options: in-store pickup, drive-up, same-day delivery, Shipt shoppers (same-day delivery).
- Increase automation and robotics at the back end to speed up replenishment in stores.
Target digitized business processes wherever possible so that in-store employees can focus on customer touchpoints. To that end, the retailer:
- Improved supply chain by using robotics and artificial intelligence to support the warehouse team with task-oriented work such as sorting millions of products by store and by aisle.
- Upgraded the employee app so that in real-time, they can see what orders are in progress and where they can help.
Home Depot
Home Depot understands that digital transformation is a long game. They invested in new systems and aren’t shy about scrutinizing their legacy systems to see what they should retire and re-architect. But, according to Fahim Siddiqui, SVP for IT at Home Depot, they can do real magic when they create an “Interconnected ecosystem, so that we can actually bring together the install journey, the online journey, the in-app journey, as one customer journey end-to-end.”
Home Depot centered its strategy around connecting its merchandising data. Siddiqui explains, “You may end up buying five different products from five different vendors, but they’re all connected through our AI/machine learning project graph, so that you can know that they’ll come together. We partner with Google to make sure that we bring those best practices in and really deploy the pipeline, using BigQuery [in] our data analytics pipeline.”
In creating a single, frictionless digital to in-store journey, Home Depot:
- Hired around 1,000 technology professionals in technology hubs located throughout the U.S.
- Developed new mobile and ecommerce customer experiences specially built for the new “do-it-for-me” segment.
- Educated employees in new ways of thinking and moving beyond their core capabilities.
Banking
Bank of America
The rise of mobile app-based financial services, such as Venmo and Square Cash, is forcing traditional banks to offer greater convenience to customers. Bank of America is seen as leading the industry in its digital financial technology and its pace of change. In 2020, the bank made more than 800 enhancements to its mobile banking app.
Its competitive advantage is in how Bank of America uses technology to provide extreme convenience to its clients. “High tech that can seamlessly hand off to high touch and fully integrate with high touch,” says Aditya Bhasin, CIO, and Head of Consumer, Small Business and Wealth Management Technology at Bank of America. Other conveniences include:
- A digital debit card that can be used as a mobile wallet such as Apple Pay or Google Pay, and used to withdraw cash or make deposits at any one of Bank of America’s 16,000 digitally enhanced ATMs.
- The mobile ordering system enables customers to place orders for things such as foreign currency through their smartphones and track the order’s progress.
- CashPro is a complete digital banking platform for businesses to manage their payments, loans, and liquidity.
Chase
In addition to offering clients convenience, Chase created digital products to help clients feel more secure about their financial future. “This has been a really tough time for small business,” says Allison Beer, Head of Digital for Consumer and Community Banking at Chase. “Managing cash flow is a huge priority for them all of the time, but especially right now.” A few ways Chase uses digital technologies to create products that help customers feel more financially secure:
- Debit card for kids and teens. Helps develop healthy spending and savings habits. Comes with a special version of the Chase mobile app that enables parents to build in budgets, allowances, payments for chores, and more.
- QuickAccept, a contactless mobile reader, allows businesses to process credit cards and draw payments on the same day they’re taken.
- Free same-day funding on sales made through QuickAccept, something for which Square charges 1.5%.
Technology
Microsoft
As a tech company, Microsoft embraces digital transformation to remain relevant. The company bakes transformation into its business processes so that employees can get their work done with less friction. Some of their efforts include:
- Moving to cloud-centered IT operations utilizing Azure-based offerings.
- Developing AI and machine learning—not to replace people but augment and accelerate human decisions.
- Centralizing funding and prioritization where Microsoft Digital owns the budget so they can fund work based on their vision.
Amazon
Amazon relies on data, AI, and cloud computing for running its business and for every product and service it offers. The company believes that as it improves on those tools, it maintains competitive advantage.
To that end, Amazon continues evolving how technology is used to improve how the business runs:
- Quicksight uses natural language processing-powered querying so that users get answers to questions about their business data in everyday language.
- AWS Marketplace customers can find and buy third-party software and professional services to support the full lifecycle of those products.
- They continue moving forward with Amazon Bracket to test quantum computing on both the practical and the theoretical levels.
Professional services
Deloitte
Despite uncertainties brought on by the events of 2020, Deloitte’s IT priorities stayed fundamentally the same. That’s in large part to having digital transformation well underway pre-pandemic, which enabled them to manage through ongoing disruption.
For example, years before the worldwide lockdown, Deloitte designed its system to support an increasingly mobile and distributed workforce, and contractors, partners, and vendors required secure access to Deloitte’s IT system. Although accommodating a sudden and large transition to remote work put a tendon. সহজ বাংলা: মাংসপেশি/টেনডনে টান।" data-rx-term="strain" data-rx-definition="A strain is injury to a muscle or tendon. সহজ বাংলা: মাংসপেশি/টেনডনে টান।">strain on Deloitte’s IT infrastructure, they had the mechanisms in place to manage it.
2020 made clear digitization isn’t an option. As the business environment searches for stability, some of Deloitte’s pre-existing IT initiatives will accelerate, while others will continue but at a slower pace. For example, the company plans to:
- Accelerate the migration of IT operations to the cloud. Reducing on-premise as much as possible to increase productivity and cost-effectiveness.
- Cut operational costs using IT technologies, including both cloud migration and increased process automation, to free more budget for innovation.
Insurance
Barings
When CIO Andy Lennon assumed responsibility for an IT portfolio gained from merging five entities, he had to unify a technology portfolio that supported thousands of employees in 18 countries. And an IT team of 300 people covering application development, infrastructure operations, and cyber security.
Lennon sees digital transformation as a people-first issue and technology second in that they must see what employees need first, then use technology to solve that problem. To that end, some of the team’s efforts include:
- Creating a communications platform and integrating phone systems, video conferencing, email, and a directory across a global workforce spanning 18 countries
- Merging all its existing websites into a single public-facing website
- Replacing their outdated MPLS network with a global SD-WAN network
Continuing his people-first approach, he believes in using technology to free humans for what they do best. For example, they launched the use of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to turn physical documents into electronic documents, extracting the data from those, and use it to make evaluations. “We’re taking humans out of the equation from an entry perspective and instead using humans to add value on the back-end to make sure the evaluations are correct,” says Lennon.
Wine and Spirits
Anheuser-Busch InBev
Anheuser-Busch (AB) InBev uses technology to drive the company’s commercial strategy, supply chain, marketing, and workflows across 12 breweries to its 4 million retail store partners, and customers. For example:
- Their mobile app, Hoppy, uses gamification to teach consumers fun facts about beer.
- B2B clients use the BEES app to place orders and check on delivery times. Plus an inventory algorithm makes replenishment suggestions so stores never run dry.
- Breweries use IoT to monitor the quantity, quality, temperature, and other traits in each batch.
- Its marketing team is exploring software that monitors social media and other channels to learn how consumers perceive its brands so Anheuser-Busch can fine-tune its messages and content.
Pharma
McKesson
McKesson has a distributed, very complex IT environment. A few years ago, it began a plan to improve its flexibility and adaptability by simplifying its IT landscape. For a company this size, simplifying IT, and doing it without disrupting their global supply chain, is a huge, multi-year undertaking. Some of their achievements to date include:
- Accelerating the pace at which it updates its current software from every three to four weeks to daily or even hourly.
- Adopting a testing platform that automates testing across every part of its complex systems and processes to ensure the software functions properly.
- In Europe, they digitized the entire buying process for customers and moved it to an online portal hosted in the cloud.
- The online order system sits alongside a new CRM so that customer service can access all the information they need to provide better service.
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)
In 2018, GSK launched the Value Strikes program to speed up how quickly they problem-solve. Each value strike project uses an agile, sprint-based approach to reach data and analytics goals faster. Teams identify a problem, gather feedback quickly, then use the existing data to take action sooner. Instead of waiting for perfect data, they use advanced analytics with data expertise to squeeze insights out of even small data sets.
Using this targeted approach, the supply chain analytics team implemented a new set of digital and analytics tools to identify inventory reduction opportunities across the company’s supply chain. The new suite of tools included a digital value stream map, safety stock optimizer, inventory corridor report, and planning cockpit.
In another project, payables designed tools that align terms within documents, including invoices and contracts, to best practices in local markets and industries. The team designed and began launching it throughout the organization within months.
GSK also designed new business processes and adjusted existing ones to support their analytics and data initiatives. Data scientists developed two new platforms to free data from silos: A data provisioning platform integrates all data into a single system and streams in algorithms with the latest data in real-time, and a visualization platform for each of the value strike projects to support decisions.
Pfizer
For years, Pfizer sought ways to improve patients’ experiences and outcomes through digital technologies. Before the upheaval of 2020, the company was using big data, machine learning, AI, and other such digital technologies to speed up the drug discovery and development process—which contributed to the company delivering a COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year. By doubling down on its digital capabilities, Pfizer continued to reach more than 400 million patients worldwide with medicines and vaccines despite global travel restrictions and lockdowns.
The company also provides patients and caregivers a collection of digital tools to better manage symptoms and address patient questions in real-time. Their latest tool, Mabu1, is an AI-powered robot that “talks” with patients about how they’re feeling and helps answer questions they may have about their treatment. The data and insights collected are sent to clinicians at a specialty pharmacy provider so that a patient’s caregivers can reach out at the right time, with the right approach.
Aligned with its purpose to provide breakthroughs that change people’s lives, Pfizer is also testing drone deliveries to provide people in remote, underserved communities with timely access to vaccines and medications. The drones’ electronic health management system also identifies supply chain efficiencies and aids in tracking disease patterns and health care needs.
Conclusion
Yes, digital transformation takes work, but that’s expected. Remember, you’re not merely adapting or upgrading—you’re transforming. As the examples illustrate, digital transformation is about innovating to secure a successful future for your company.
