Digitizing Business Processes Leads to Cost Reduction

The benefits that digitizing businesses can bring to enterprises in terms of customer satisfaction and customer retention—two of the major goals of all businesses—are overwhelming. As taking perfect decisions depends largely on the accuracy of the available data, the need to introduce a robust, digitize infrastructure is the need of the hour.

“Strong business processes formulate and cement the long term growth of any organization. As business processes mature, it is important to limit manual dependencies and ensure their success and longevity,” says Yagnesh Parikh, CTO, ICICI Securities.

Broadly, business processes can be categorized into two types—internal operational process and customer perspective process. By optimizing these areas, top level management can reduce costs.

“Digitization of business processes will definitely benefit companies. A major thing that happens when you optimize processes is the reduction of marketing time. Then, digitization makes it possible to derive maximum benefits by using minimum resources,” says Yatendra Kumar, IT head, Gokaldas Exports.

Parikh says that customer-facing process automations can drive improvement in customer retention and better experience, which will directly reflect in revenue increase.

In order to ensure growth and sustainability of an enterprise, it is very crucial for decision makers to have access to accurate data, which in turn depends mostly on the IT department’s performance.

“IT is all about information and taking crucial and accurate business decisions. You need information about the processes, details about the health of the company, and information regarding the business IT provides,” says Kumar.

When it comes to having accurate data or information on the platter, its vital to ensure that there is proper level of communication between the IT department and business heads. As IT is gradually becoming more and more customer-facing, CIOs should ensure that his department understands the value of business.

“Everyone in the firm is very focussed on customers and in most decisions everyone is involved from the beginning.” says Parikh.

He said majority of their decisions are led keeping in mind customers,  products and services by external customers and efficiency by internal customers. “Fortunately division between business and IT is not there in my company, perhaps that is a big factor in our success,” Parikh added.

Even though a hefty amount of money is needed to be spent initially for digitizing business processes, the return on investment is mostly greater than the cost.