6 Steps to Digital Transformations: Unlock Your Future Potential
Author: Ra’ttana (SAM) Veng, MBA, PMP
Discover six steps to digital transformation. Success begins with assessments to find areas that need work. It’s maintained by measuring and monitoring progress.
Every great journey begins with a single step—and that’s true for digital transformation, too.
Whether you realize it or not, every company is on a journey to improve operations through technology and automation. (Even Belden! Read our digital transformation story.) While some companies are racing ahead, others haven’t left the starting line yet.
But charging forward with digital transformation without a plan is like running a marathon without training. You’ll likely end up tired and frustrated.
To ensure success, there are several steps to digital transformation. And the most important thing to realize along the way is this: Change doesn’t happen overnight. Incremental improvements are the key to progress.?
Here, we outline the six steps to digital transformation.
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1. Assess your company’s current state
You can only establish a clear vision of the future once you understand where your company stands today.?
This means benchmarking your organization’s current performance. Assessing the current state of operations?often involves a comprehensive evaluation of systems, processes and technologies to identify areas that require improvement.?
This evaluation can include a review of:
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2. Define your company’s goals
What does your company want to achieve? What are its goals and biggest challenges??
Before anything else can be established, these questions must be answered. Technology shouldn’t be implemented merely for technology’s sake but instead to solve a problem.?
A well-defined strategy gives everyone a sense of direction and purpose so they understand what’s being done—and why.?
For example, perhaps your industrial plant has discovered production bottlenecks and quality control issues. Long-held manual processes are creating inefficiencies and mistakes. As a result, your goals or strategy might look like this: Your plant wants to transform its operations within the next three years by implementing smart manufacturing practices?that will increase production by 16% and reduce quality issues by 20%.
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3. Identify the digital solutions you’ll use
Now that you've identified your objectives and areas for improvement, it's time to consider digital solutions to overcome your obstacles and meet your goals.?
Because every organization is different, no single set of digital solutions will work everywhere and solve all problems.?
Evaluate how potential digital solutions will align with your defined strategy and address the pain points you identified during the assessment phase—and find out what they cost. Before deployment, consider conducting pilot projects to see if the solutions will work as planned.?
Make sure the digital solutions you select will work with your legacy systems?and processes without lots of rework or rip-and-replace scenarios. This will reduce disruption and keep costs in check.
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4. Develop an implementation plan
Next up is developing an automation implementation plan. In other words, you need to determine how you will:
Now is also the time to determine what data is most important, how data will be ingested?and how it will be contextualized so it can be used for decision-making.
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5. Engage your employees
People at all levels make your organization run. They matter in your digital transformation journey, and their buy-in will help you realize a return on your investment sooner vs. later.?
When your workers understand the benefits and goals of digital transformation—not only for the organization but also for them personally—they are more likely to embrace the changes, follow the steps to digital transformation and ensure a successful journey.?
Be sure to give employees the opportunity to ask questions, voice concerns and contribute to the decision-making process when it makes sense for them to do so.
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6. Monitor and measure progress
There is no finish line for digital transformation. It’s a race that never ends. By tracking the impact of the technology and processes you’ve implemented, you can make sure your investments yield expected results. This also gives you the opportunity to refine and optimize your strategies as time goes on.
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Follow the right steps to get results
We’ve helped many organizations follow these same steps to digital transformation, and their efforts have generated major gains in efficiency, uptime, throughput, network and production visibility, and quality control.?
When manufacturers can use technology and automation to ramp up production and make more inventory available, they can better meet demand, capture more market share and be more competitive on price. When they become more efficient, they use fewer resources, which lowers production costs.?
Lower production costs create higher profit margins, even if pricing for their goods remains the same. They also allow manufacturers to lower prices to attract more customers if they choose.?
Belden’s Customer Innovation Centers can help you establish your own roadmap to guide your progress toward innovation and growth. With our help, you’ll know which direction to go—and when to go there.?
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