Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have more tools to boost their business than ever before. However, making the most of digital transformation requires understanding what these solutions offer and how you can implement them.
Improved accuracy and error reduction are some of the most promising benefits of digital transformation. If you can capitalize on technologies like cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI), you can unlock more informative insights, higher productivity, and less disruption. Here are five ways how.
Consolidating Information
The first and most straightforward way to achieve these benefits is to maximize your visibility across your organization. Digital tools enable you to keep all your critical information in one place, making it easier to spot errors and providing more context for this data.
One of the biggest advantages of cloud computing is that multiple users can access the same files simultaneously and see each other’s changes in real time. These features provide a single, continually updated source of truth for all parties. This visibility, in turn, reduces confusion and makes it easier to collaborate.
Of course, things can get complex and spread across separate programs, even in the cloud for SMEs. You can avoid this by using management software that consolidates multiple apps or employing AI to gather and organize your data.
Improving Accessibility
Similarly, digital transformation can also make important data and tools easier to access. On top of consolidating once-disparate resources, cloud platforms can make everything remotely accessible. This lets you see and respond to changes faster, minimizing the risk of overlooking critical information or delaying time-sensitive action.
Digital tools like remote collaboration software take these benefits further by enabling remote work. Studies show that home-based employees are often more productive, thanks to fewer distractions and a more comfortable working environment. These improvements help them pay more attention to their jobs, reducing the risk of errors.
Other digital resources, like Internet of Things (IoT) devices, can give you and your employees real-time updates about mission-critical processes. As a result, you can adapt better and minimize disruption from unforeseen circumstances through speedier responses.
Automating Time-Consuming Tasks
Digital transformation lets you automate your most inefficient and error-prone tasks. Manual approaches to administrative duties like data tracking or inventory management are often time-consuming, and their repetitive nature makes them unengaging. As a result, people are more likely to make mistakes or spend too much time on them.
People struggle with highly repetitive and data-heavy tasks, but this is where computers excel. Consequently, tools like robotic process automation (RPA) can accomplish them faster and with fewer mistakes, freeing employees to focus on other duties they find interesting.
Automating data entry, scheduling, and other non-value-adding, back-office tasks will also reduce the workload on your employees. As a result, they’ll be able to focus more, further minimizing errors and boosting accuracy.
Gaining Deeper Insight
Going digital in more areas for SMEs will also increase the amount of available quantifiable information. Using digital systems instead of traditional workflows and resources means virtually every action generates data. This gives you more insight into your organization’s operations, informing more accurate decision-making.
You should feed all this information through AI algorithms to make the most of this insight. Data analysis, like other administrative tasks, is repetitive and highly detailed, especially with large datasets. As such, it’s easy for humans to miss some patterns in all the noise. Using AI instead can reveal trends you may have overlooked otherwise.
AI-driven data analytics can reveal what’s working in your business and what isn’t. You can then make the most informed decisions to adapt and improve as your company grows and faces new challenges.
Increasing Accountability
An easier-to-overlook advantage of digital transformation is its ability to hold people accountable. Everything generates a virtual paper trail in a digital environment, so it’s easier to trace problems to their origin. That informs ongoing improvements in some areas and, in others, helps ensure employees and partners work as they should.
Project management software, which just 23% of organizations use, shows who’s responsible for each task in a project. This makes it easier for people to understand their roles and responsibilities, avoiding mistakes.
Accountability is about more than just ensuring people aren’t lazy or break the rules. In many cases, good, talented employees can overlook or forget about certain responsibilities or deadlines because things need to be clarified. Providing more clarification with these digital tools helps prevent that and provides the direction people need.
SMEs Need Digital Transformation
Digital transformation can be intimidating, but the benefits speak for themselves. Organizations that implement these tools can improve accuracy and prevent errors across every aspect of the business.
These improvements are becoming increasingly crucial in today’s crowded business market. Companies that don’t implement them risk falling behind the competition. Capitalizing on digital transformation early will help you succeed now and in the future.
