In times of crisis, the natural impulse from business is to cut costs and conserve capital. That makes sense across many categories, except perhaps one – Digital Transformation which, in many cases, may be crucial for survival.
Why? Because if Covid-19 has taught us anything, it’s that business needs to prioritise being able to respond nimbly and effectively to any rogue event being thrown at it, pivoting to a position that secures a company’s future and that of its employees and stakeholders.”, That’s according to Dan Carroll, Chief Technical Officer, Xcentuate Management Solutions.
Most companies will have various levels of transformation programme in the offing as they look to move their company onto a more digital footing. These programmes tend to be large, complex and involve multiple deliveries.
In fact, Gartner has said that Global IT spend will reduce by 8% in 2020. This is despite that fact that many companies will have had additional IT spend to get their workforce working from home during the crisis.
However, in terms of next steps for digital transformation, there are only three critical questions that need to be asked:
- Has the spend been committed?
- What is the return on investment and payback period?
- Is the project delivering efficiencies and when will these efficiencies emerge?
Then, are there projects which can meet these new strict criteria?
The world leading ActiveOps solution planned and implemented exclusively in Ireland by Xcentuate is one which can. Some key benefits are:
- It delivers a minimum of 15% productivity improvement within a year, which can be used to support cost saving
- Implementation is a quick 60 days and benefits start to deliver before the end of the project
- It brings the back-office customer support into a digital age
- It supports the delivery of efficiency from other projects
- It is a proven solution, implemented across the world in 100s of different organisations
At Xcentuate, our clients have been seeing additional benefits from the ActiveOps solution in supporting them dealing with the crisis:
- Plan and control in a rapidly changing environment
The solution provides real time visibility of where a team/function is against their operational plan. Where there are significant deviations (work levels or resources or both), this is instantly visible and managers can take corrective action.
- Supporting working from home
A lot of companies have had to embrace having the majority if not all of their staff working remotely. The ActiveOps solution not only provides visibility of the performance of all teams and staff regardless of location, but the management process is extremely strong at connecting these now virtual teams. The communications included in the solution (weekly communication to team of plans, daily check-in with team to evaluate progress against plan) are really powerful at ensuring the remote workforce stay engaged and working together as a team.
- Support BCP planning for different scenarios
One of the strengths of the ActiveOps solution is the ability to plan for different scenarios really quickly. Operations can produce several what-if scenarios to examine what will the operational outcome be of different situations and agree in advance what actions they would take. For example if 20% of the workforce become sick. These can then feed into the company’s overall BCP planning, supporting quicker response should any of these situations arise.
The solution can also be delivered remotely, meaning that there is no need to wait until the crisis has passed to start an ActiveOps project.
If you are taking a critical look at your digital transformation projects – rather than cutting back, think about adding the ActiveOps solution and see how it can transform your business.
