The DX iceberg - Changes and agility as underlying impacts

When the digital age calls for greater agility, a competent technical consulting partner sees beyond the questions asked by the client and helps them navigate towards more long-term values.

Key takeaways:

• The digital age has urged business leaders to reimagine their operations and strategies with greater agility and openness to changes and failure.?
• Combining their tech expertise with domain knowledge helps IT partners play an active role in helping their clients navigate in this direction.?

Digital transformation reaches beyond what is measurable

When starting a digital transformation (DX) initiative, what do you and your business expect to achieve?

The common keywords? We can go all day: “We will help you save costs, we will help you work faster, and we will help you become more productive”.?

HOWEVER, we must reach beyond the short-term and measurable impacts. DX goes a step further: it fosters a change in mindset towards innovation. A mindset change is less tangible and takes longer to become visible, but its importance should not be underestimated.?

Let’s analyze the statement via a recent solution we finished for a manufacturing company.

The AI-fueled warehouse management solution yielded immediate improvements such as reduced wait time, fewer human errors, and automated data processing. Apart from those, GEM’s solution helped foster a brand new willingness to adopt innovative changes and become open to trial and error.?

How has the “mindset change” unfolded in our client’s case?

Shifting to large-scale operational automation

For GEM’s client and many other manufacturing businesses, warehouse management used to largely rely on human staff to count inventories and enter input. As the system proved to be highly reliable with a high accuracy rate, it encouraged its end-users to switch to a digitized warehouse management method.

Reducing human effort spent on mundane tasks?

Thanks to the vast improvement in efficiency yielded by the system, human staff could dedicate their time and efforts to more meaningful tasks such as strategic decision-making. Therefore, the solution tailored by GEM has contributed to fostering a working culture where machines empower the human workforce and foster human creativity.?

From our case study, it can be seen that the transformative influences of digital technologies have created business leaders and senior executives who dare to rethink and even challenge their existing systems. In addition, the digital age also accelerates the development and adoption pace. With modern development approaches and tools, project teams can quickly create a prototype for the process of trial and error. Everything happens quickly, from testing and determining whether it is the right or wrong answer to figuring out what to adjust. As a result, the speed at which they reach a final suitable solution will be accelerated.

Businesses are now able to create fast, fail fast, and navigate fast in their DX journey.

The situation has been summed up wittingly by a senior expert at GEM: “Businesses are now able to create fast, fail fast, and navigate fast in their DX journey.”

A competent DX partner helps you find untouched opportunities

As a technical consulting partner, GEM has gone beyond delivering what the client has asked. We seek to not satisfy but to exceed client expectations. With the project mentioned above, after intensive discussions with the client about their current situation, we helped them identify the untapped potential that will be addressed once digital technologies are involved. This step of business understanding allowed GEM’s team to deliver immense long-term values via our solution.?

From a larger perspective, we can see that in the digital age, the role of IT vendors in enabling successful DX plans is undeniable. Their capability is no longer restrictively about doing what they are assigned to. By enriching both tech expertise and their industry knowledge, IT vendors, apart from delivery services, can offer essential technical consultancy including:?

• What tech tools should be picked based on the defined business challenges?
• How can the solution be integrated into the existing system?
• How can the client manage changes caused by the solution?
• How can the solution be scalable and yield long-term values?

Closing remark

The digital age has yielded a long-term influence on the business landscape: organizations now need to be more agile and willing to embrace changes and even failures. Simultaneously, the role of IT vendors also increases in terms of consultancy capability, which urges them to sharpen their knowledge and expertise.?