Start at the very beginning, a very good place to start…

Don’t worry, I’m not about to burst into song and start running through the alpine meadows. But within the opening lines of this song lies a useful message to keep in mind when approaching the end-to-end digital transformation of a business.

Often when we talk about digital or digital transformation people’s minds will immediately jump to customer facing aspects. The adoption of digital as a shorthand term for digital marketing or digital commerce has a part to play here, inevitably leading to questions like how do we sell via digital channels like e-commerce? How can we make better use of digital marketing channels? What is our app strategy?

These are all great questions to be asking, but to really be transformative to the performance of a business, a digital transformation needs to take place throughout its core thread, from end to end. This means including the often forgotten engine rooms within the business like operations, supply chain, logistics and customer service.

But even in businesses where this is understood, another question comes to the fore - where should we start?

Releasing constraints

If you're looking to improve a process or fix a specific problem then the selection of where to begin is fairly straightforward. There’s plenty of approaches out there, but the theory of constraints (TOC) would suggest identifying the bottleneck and starting there.

As a continuous improvement approach this is ideal. TOC puts the focus where it needs to be to see improved throughput. Even within a broader transformation I'd still use this to uncover many of the challenges that need to be addressed.

But digital transformation is (or should be) more encompassing and revolutionary than a single improvement activity. It should of course resolve the issues and constraints that exist in the current state, but its purpose is also to provide the seismic shift in approach that unlocks even greater improvement than would be possible by remaining in the existing paradigm.

Getting back to the start

Let’s assume that the business in question has a strategy and therefore knows where it wants to play and how it will compete as it does so. Without this we lack the direction in which to focus our transformation efforts.

In my former role at Boohoo, the business was targeting fast fashion for a young adult demographic in a pure-play e-commerce context, and to do so needed to be quick(er) to spot trends, test product ideas and repeat those which worked well. The transformation effort was therefore focused on how to get products from “idea” to “test” as quickly as possible in order to fast-follow as trends emerged.

This process focus and its start and end points is company specific. The key factor is to identify the most important end-to-end process (or processes) within the business - the one that powers the customer experience and executes the business strategy, and then to find where it begins.

Creating the foundations

It might seem strange at first to seek transformation of the customer experience seemingly so far removed from the customer. But this focus on foundational, back-end activities provides the solid base on which customer experience and service can be built. By starting at the end, you’ll frequently find yourself having to step back through to the beginning anyway when it turns out these foundations aren’t yet in place.

To bring this to life - in our case, this led to us improving how purchase orders were raised and product data was captured as a starting point for our transformation. Looked at directly, neither may seem to contribute much to customer experience. But follow the threads of process and data through the business and it's pretty much inarguable that product data is a core factor behind product experience, discovery and personalisation; and in a business that is so focused on new product launches - raising orders quickly, efficiently and accurately is a key strength in enabling this.

It’s worth calling out though that this focus on the start shouldn’t be done blindly. Finding a starting point in this way isn’t just about selecting the most upstream activity that the business conducts, but the one that is logically linked through the core process to the generation of business value.

When you read you begin with A, B, C…

What this looks like will vary between businesses. So, just as in the song where Maria explains that reading begins with A, B, C and singing with Do, Re, Mi - the starting point for each business varies likewise.

Knowing how your business provides value to your customers, and what differentiates it within the competitor landscape is key to this. If you compete on speed or reactions, then the transformation you go through will be different from a price focused competitor, or one that majors on customer service; and your starting point will vary likewise.

So whether it is reading, counting or singing the commonality is to start with the foundations and the basic building blocks at the beginning of the process, from which much grander and significant outcomes can be created.

In other words, start from the very beginning.