Adapt Ceaselessly to Succeed in a Volatile Digital World

Enterprises today are constantly dealing with challenges and opportunities spawned by the digital revolution. Succeeding in this volatile world calls for agility and vision, the ability to move along with changing customer demands, variable market realities, and technical disruptions. In other words, the need of the hour is to be a “live enterprise” – sensing and responding in real time to disruptions for survival and success.

Adapt with technology for transformational change

Every organization in every industry is adapting, but how you choose to adapt is critical to whether those changes will thrive – and navigate you to your next innovation or advantage. While organizational changes, process re-engineering, or new operational models can help enterprises adapt, it is the technology itself that plays a far superior role in changing the game. Adopting technology goes beyond incremental improvement; it is clever innovation that will make a transformational impact on the enterprise.

Here’s an example: To combat the threat of counterfeit medicines, a global pharmaceutical giant implemented a serialization track-and-trace system built on an enterprise cloud to obtain visibility into products, support distribution management, and ensure compliance with product security requirements. This solution enabled distribution partners to check the validity of medicines using smartphones and leveraged big data insights to help identify spurious drugs. With this implementation, instead of minor gains in efficiency, the company gained the power to effectively mitigate the menace of fake drugs.

Another example: To address the challenge of communicating with a large number of dealers spread across geographies for thousands of transactions, a Japanese automobile leader digitally transformed its dealer communications by replacing the legacy dealer system with a secure, multi-browser, multi-currency, multilingual portal that is accessed 24/7 by more than 1,200 dealers and processes over 400,000 transactions daily. The system has increased productivity by almost 40% and is projected to deliver a 70% ROI over the next few years.

Reimagine enterprises with automation, data, and algorithms

Enterprises must embrace automation, data, and algorithms to unlock unprecedented sources of value. These capabilities empower enterprises to be more productive minimizing errors, to learn from data, and to leverage it to make better decisions. It will help them be smarter and faster in their response to the environment.

For example, one multinational office automation company used machine learning (ML) to predict propensity-to-buy across customer segments and sales territories in the U.S. The model cost significantly less than conventional statistical analysis tools, processes more than two million records in six seconds with greater than 80% accuracy, and helps sales teams improve their cross-sell success rates.

On the analytics side, one of the largest personal property and casualty insurers in the U.S. moved decisively into advanced analytics, enabling it to create new risk pricing models and customer value from big data. The company is building a totally new data science organization that differs culturally from one steeped in traditional analytics. One goal is to combine computer science and statistics and move decision-making to the front office, where ML automates low-level decisions and informs those that are critical. Another goal is to develop new data products based on the Internet of Things (connected homes, autonomous cars, etc.) to mitigate risk by giving customers advanced warning of impending events.

Every enterprise must chart its own course depending on its current situation and targeted end-state; this end-state is a moving target over time as the enterprise advances to new goals. That said, the technology goals of every enterprise today are ultimately the same: to deliver experiences that can survive the acid test of next-generation expectations; to bring solutions from the realm of imagination into the realm of possibility; and to produce significant, unprecedented economic value for all those whose lives they touch.