Business Digitalisation Strategy 2

Business Digitalisation is one of the buzzword in business world now as businesses wants to leverage on technology to help them being more efficient and effective in what they are doing. Business Digitalisation may sounds gigantic to many but it is definitely possible to break them down into chunks and approach them progressively. Business Digitalisation must be approached in a holistic manner that cross across multiple department and disciplines.

We are very fortunate to partner with a famous local brand in Singapore, embarking on the journey of organisation wide business digitalisation.

Inaugurating Q-Management System for Lim Chee Guan ION Outlet

The key deliverable we have for Lunar New Year 2019 is operationalising the Queue Management System to reduce the time customer spend in queuing for their favourite Bak Kwa (Pork Jerky). This is one of the "must have" item during Lunar New Year. While we are only on the first stage of Phase 1, there are already valuable lessons that will help us in the future stages.

Below are 3 things that we like to share after completing the delivery for this stage.

It is important to involve people from all levels across various departments. The impact will not stay within just the department where technology are being implemented.

An organisation is a closely knitted community, like our body, where various departments depends on one another to function properly. While a technological solution is being implemented to a department, the outcome could affect various departments.

Take for example an User Interface, we need to consider the graphical representation to overall corporate branding, the usability on ground, consideration on indicators that are important for management, user processes, etc.

Consideration of Technology, Human and Process are important, without considering of all these 3 factors, the solution will just breakdown upon implementation.

When we roll out this for operational trial, we do not just Train & Go. We spend time on the ground to observe what they are doing before the implementation and after the implementation.

It is important to be listening to feedback and comments from the people who are using it. The solution is there to help them with their work and not to create unnecessary or additional work for them. While most of the issue are being arrested during the planning stage, there are some "untold truth" that we observed on the ground.

There will also be something that they have done it so well that they are unconsciously competent that they do not even realised that they are doing those actions. Upon seeing those "untold" processes, we tweak the interface to eliminate a total of 3 steps from 2 stations, reducing inconvenience and increasing the output timing.

Nothing beats seeing it in action. It is important to be flexible enough to make changes to suit operational issues that are being see during planning stage.

As mentioned above, there will also be "untold truth" that's due to unconsciously competency which the user themselves are not aware of. It is best to be flexible and make changes after seeing the real situation on the ground.

When we are running the test plan and trial in laboratory environment, condition tends to be ideal. Issues such as network gaps which resulted in incomplete instructions or data are not being seen. Such causes operational matters that affects the functionality of the solution when being used.

Most importantly, which each locations are being run in a similar manner, each of their local environmental conditions could differ significantly. Thus, it is highly recommended to create a set of trial instructions to be carried out in each locations. Putting down the result, observation and even images of physical environment which could come in handy in the event of isolated fault.

Managing Changes that comes with Business Digitalisation

Acquisition of digital tools does not meant that the process of Business Digitalisation has been completed. Acquisition is the first step and managing change comes with this, it is a package deal. In some instances, while the business has already acquired the necessary technology, they will not want to fully utilised the solution due to other considerations.

One of the methodology that organisation can adopt to approach this journey is applying Lean & Agile. You can read more of this from the book - Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale.