Why Business Should Adopt Digital Transformation amidst COVID 19

To cope with the changing business landscape and stay competitive, businesses are reinventing themselves by adopting digital transformation. Digital transformation refers to upgrading the business activities, process, competencies and business models to leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies and their impact in a strategic and prioritized way. The success of digital transformation depends on having quality data, and neglecting the quality and governance of data will undermine digital transformation initiatives. A business that is considering digital transformation should first work with a data conversion company to convert all its data into digital format and organize it efficiently to make informed decisions.

Although digital transformation offers many benefits, not all businesses have switched to a complete digital set up. However, with the challenges that the pandemic has brought about, more and more businesses are seriously considering implementing digital transformation strategies. Here are the three main ways the COVID-19 pandemic has made a strong case for digital transformation:

·         Automation for better safety and minimized cost: Almost all industries consider the process of automation as a measure in their innovative agenda. But with the outbreak of the pandemic, automation is no longer an innovative step, but one that is necessary to build resilience. This is due to the pressure from the cost of the human workforce and the need to have less human workforce in various workspaces. Organizations are forced to promote hyper automation and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and with the automation of back-office processes, the organization can identify which processes in the front office can be streamlined by automation. Customer-facing automation is also a significant digital project that can add value and also become a competitive differentiator for a company.

·         Priority for customer facing digital projects: Most long-term projects are on hold in majority of the companies and all projects related to their clients are being prioritized. Businesses that had already embraced digital transformation were able to adjust to the effects of the pandemic and have leveraged centralized operations and communication systems for better control and accessibility.

·         Fix gaps, redundancies and conflicts: In recent months, organizations have effectively conducted large scale audits of the present state of the digital transformation. Businesses that used new technology have found gaps, redundancies and conflicts in the process. The actual utility of these technologies became evident only after experiencing them. For example, a global bank that had strived to roll  out the Microsoft Teams for 24 months, took only 16 days to get it out when the pandemic struck (www.e-zigurat.com).  

Kroger Makes Efforts To Digitize During COVID 19

The outbreak of Corona Virus has led to a paradigm shift in consumer buying behavior. People are now shopping more essential items rather than discretionary purchases. Moreover business are now concentrating on omni channel operations and modifying their delivery service to meet the needs of the customers as well as to promote social distancing.

In Ohio, Cincinati, Krogrer Co. has prioritized its actions to meet the needs rising demands of the commodities in this prevailing crisis. They have been making investments to boost omni channel operations, improve supply chain to ensure swift customer service amid such challenging times.

During the first-quarter fiscal 2020, Kroger registered a sharp rise in sales across both brick-&-mortar stores and digital channels. The digital sales soared 92% in the first quarter, while pickup or delivery reached 97% of Kroger households (2,000 pickup locations and 2,400 delivery locations). In the first three weeks of the second quarter, digital sales were up in triple digits. This is because the company realized the need of the hour and offered no-contact delivery options, low-contact pickup service, and ship-to-home orders.

This shows that a firm in the grocery industry has made sincere efforts to cope with the prevailing situation and also meet the demands of the customers through automation. The company also has autonomous, driverless vehicles for grocery delivery services and they also started accepting Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for pickup orders.

The bottom line: digital transformation has become a necessity for businesses today to improve the business operations and meet the needs of the customers. Organizations considering digital transformation can ensure that their data is of high quality with help of a data conversion company. Such companies provide top quality data entry, data processing, data cleansing and data conversion support which is crucial for successful digitization.