Going Digital? – The paradigm doesn’t shift

Introduction

Digital stands in the management domain to mean a part or full value addition is happening through electronic means. Digital comes from original ‘binary digit’ standing for electric levels corresponding to ‘zero’ or ‘one’. In other words, “zero” is absence of the waveform and “one” is present. Certain range/thresholds are used to distinguish these levels. This is the way electronic communication started happening in a dependable manner.

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Value chain turns digital

For any physical product when we consider the “value chain”, major portions are facilitated by digital. Let us consider a simple tea powder as a product. The pre-bidding, bidding, invoices for the goods to be received, money transfers, all happen in the electronic fashion. Thus, sourcing and inbound logistics portions are digitalized. The operations portion of CTC making, packing, information processing, dispatch to warehouses, and further down, all these carries huge information in digital formats.

Given digital marketing is becoming popular, products are made visible through digital media to create the pull. The push too happens through online and ‘platforms’ that are available that give higher discounts. It is true that realty costs and employee costs are far lower for the online formats. Huge savings for the promoters happen on this front. A portion of these savings are ‘passed on to’ the customers. Thus, ‘push’ is happening. Thus, both pull and push are digitally enabled and facilitated is the understanding.

On secondary or support activities front, people function HR, finance, technology, and administration wings utilize lots of information age devices, databases, and tools for various function-specific applications. Then, digital business is the only name we can give to the current situation. Cross-functional Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) related inter-linked modules get implemented, and organization level digital facilitation is happening.

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When management desires processes be digitized

Manual processes getting converted into ‘digital’ is not the right approach. During the attempts to market ERPs, “Reengineering” the business processes was thought of. Often many companies make the sequences that happen on the physical front, translated digitally. It is dumping the physical trash in digitized format. Inefficiencies are just ‘ported’ into the virtual world. No process improvement on logical lines could happen. Look at the value adding steps, separate these steps, zero based questioning for each of the steps must happen in terms of whether it is required and if so, how it can be made simplified and straight. New flows must emerge with efficient processes post this reengineering exercise. In other words, it is much more than ‘computerizing’ as the word was used for typing the letters in personal computer rather than on a typewriter.

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Relying on age-old practices

Years ago, for the first time one industrial unit in north-central India of a large utility organization wanted to implement “automatic” attendance management system. Biometric machines were yet to emerge. The “card drop” system was implemented, meaning employees shall pick their card at the “gate” and insert it in a drop box. Attendance for the employee gets marked. Either “in” or “out” is pressed by the employee at the time of dropping. These timings go for backend salary processing. The problem was the employees would “drop” the card, marking attendance at the gate, but won’t reach workplace. So, the company was forced to maintain the “attendance registers” at the workplaces. Digital shift did not happen.

Fast forwarded by two decades. An organization in a mega city maintained post-Covid attendance registers at the receptionist table. The point to note is, it had put up fingerprint-based bio-metric attendance system and “face/temperature recognition”, both these separated by six feet. Thus, it may be a shocker for the newly joined employee that one has to “sign” in the attendance register, then make a thumb impression, move forward and ensure “showing of the face”. All three are mandatory, HR told the employees!

Another instance is another large organization went digital. It implemented digital signature to do “processing in the application”. Point to note is “paying out” happens only when the physical document is received at the desk with the signature “in ink”.

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On an open-minded note

Phygital often talked about is a combination of value delivery through both “online” and “offline” methods. The instances covered above are not examples of phygital but lack of “digital reliance”. Here, the trust factor and comfort levels in the digital or online or non-physical are so low that original process and flow are still adhered to. Closely associated is, only old people are trusted. In these cases, process and data redundancy happens, and it is burdensome. It is akin to post-implementing ISO, organization maintaining “new formats” and “old formats” separately, and naturally in duplication.

If trust is the only issue, then it must be promoted. Digital implementation may be combined with some surveillance method (preferably embedded) or other “restricting means”. One of the examples of attendance ensuring and tracking can simply have access-controlled doors in the premises that recognize the faces of the employees. Another solution can be to have RFID attendance cards and ensuring some “geo-fencing” implemented throughout the premises. ?

Closing the topic, we may say that implementation of systems, trust-based culture, and IT security, all need to go together. This alone ensures the success aspired for and RoI.