Top 8 Benefits of Digital Transformation

14 Sep 2023

Digital transformation is a well established trend for businesses all over the globe. This is not the first time you’re hearing about it, and it certainly won’t be the last. But with enough repetition, even a term we are so frequently exposed to tends to lose its meaning—so what exactly is digital transformation? How does it differ from digitisation? And how do you create a realistic roadmap?

You can check out The Ultimate Digital Transformation Guide for the answers to these questions and a full introduction to the topic, but here we're going to dive into another important question—what are the advantages of digital transformation?

While most businesses know they should be starting on their path to digital transformation, they still don’t know the ins and outs of why. What benefits does embracing digital transformation bring to your business? In this blog we'll explore the top 8 benefits of digital transformation that you can expect as you embark on your journey.

1. Ensure Business Continuity

As we all know, technology moves quickly and it’s easy to get left behind. Just like cloud software, artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are changing the business landscape, the latest innovation is always just around the corner. Blink, and you miss it. Then you'll be stuck struggling with outdated legacy systems, while your competition leverages new advancements to drive their businesses forward.

Thankfully, staying in the loop of the latest technology is simple if you’re already taking steps in your digital transformation journey.

Accessing the latest tech innovation and real-time data in a secure environment is crucial to any industry, not just for the sake of keeping up but to ensure competitive advantage in today’s dynamic market. Creating a digital-forward environment appeals to today’s digitally native workforce and helps your business remain agile in the face of disruptions. So by embracing digital transformation, you're not only streamlining your day-to-day operations, but also empowering your workforce to grow with your organisation and securing your future success.

2. Secure Your Network

Embracing the digital age means leveraging the latest technological advancements to streamline how your organisation functions now, and in the future. In this regard, one of the foundational pillars of digital transformation is cloud computing.

The cloud enables you to take advantage of innovations while protecting your company data. Cybersecurity risk is never going away. Cybercriminals are only getting more creative, and the amount of data circulating is rapidly increasing which means that protecting your network from vulnerability is vital in ensuring business continuity for tomorrow. A single network breach can have devastating results from the loss of millions of pounds and the waste of thousands of hours, to significant reputational damage and regulatory fines.

By choosing cloud software throughout your digital transformation, you can improve security, increase flexibility, enhance accessibility, reduce IT costs and streamline implementations. So your business is better equipped to meet changing customers needs, improve operational efficiency and drive growth.

3. Increase Operational Efficiencies

It can be daunting to trust new technologies—especially if you’re still working on a legacy system or a point-to-point manual process model. Many businesses worry that efficiency will suffer while the project unfolds and staff will be weighed down with new processes.

But, these are just myths. One of the biggest benefits of digital transformation is that it significantly improves your operational efficiency and minimises the complexity and time spent on integration efforts. Having the right digital tools and ensuring those tools work together will streamline your workflows and improve productivity via the automation of manual tasks. In addition, centralising and integrating data improves communication and collaboration between teams and gives everyone access to accurate, real-time data—further boosting efficiency and enabling data-driven decision making.

Digital transformation not only creates efficiency but fosters it in a scalable and tangible way. A reliable, seamlessly integrated software ecosystem results in less downtime, fewer system delays and improved daily performance. By eliminating manual processes and technological hang-ups through digital automation, you enable your employees to focus on the core of their role and the mission of your business—driving continuous improvement and business growth.

4. Gain Faster Return on Investment

Money talks, and as business owners, we have to listen. The implementation of new technologies is often very costly and can take multiple years to produce a measured return on investment (ROI). But thankfully, a core digital transformation benefit, is not only boosting ROI, but helping you track and prove it, too.

A robust digital transformation strategy aims to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs while enhancing customer service and boosting profitability—all of which has a direct impact on your bottom line and delivers rapid ROI. But translating that strategy into metrics can be challenging.

By choosing the right tools as part of your digital transformation—such as advanced enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and business intelligence tools—you can gain real-time insights into every facet of your business operations. Faster ROI analysis enables you to track immediate impact from quick-turn deployments and measure the new revenue credited to your just-made digital investment. It’s the only way to make sure digital transformation is actually worth it. We know it is, but don’t just take our word for it, run the numbers yourself.

5. Scale as Your Business Grows

There's a common misconception that digital transformation initiatives are only for enterprise-size companies and are not attainable for smaller businesses. This couldn’t be more wrong—by investing in your digital transformation strategy now you can save and scale as your business grows.

Legacy systems that weren’t created to scale or become unsupported by their vendors are a barrier to growth, resulting in lost opportunities and costly re-platforming while giving your competitors the chance to get ahead. Instead, by bundling digital tools together and selecting a vendor committed to product development, you can create a powerful, yet cost-effective, toolkit that scales in tandem with your business.

Cloud implementation, using a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, also enables improved scalability with the ability to add users as needed and deploy new features, modules and systems quickly and painlessly. So whether you're adding product lines, employees, facilities or acquiring new companies, digital transformation initiatives help you adjust and scale as your business grows—so you're never left scrambling behind the competition.

6. Streamline Communication

Communication is key—no, really. It is. Whether it's between your systems, your employees, to your customers, or partners, clear, timely and accurate communication improves both efficiency and outcomes for everyone. Another advantage of digital transformation is how it streamlines the various lines of communication in your organisation.

With seamless integration across your technology ecosystem, your data is centralised and updated in real time so that everyone is working from the same information. This means you can decrease blind spots, break down silos, eliminate delays in information transfers and easily identify bottlenecks.

Communication speed and quality can play a determining role in your business's longevity. When your internal communication is smooth it is reflected in the communication to your customer, whether that be through step-by-step order tracking, recall notifications or customer service. You can even enhance customer and partner communication further by deploying tools like electronic data interchange (EDI) as part of your digital transformation roadmap.

A comprehensive digital transformation provides you with a single source of truth—fostering collaboration between your teams internally and streamlining communications with your customers and partners.

7. Enhance Customer Experience

With new players entering your market space every day, your customers are being presented with an assorted menu of tempting options. Your business has to stand out by offering products or services that meet the demands of discerning buyers, and provide them with excellent customer service throughout their journey.

Communication is just one of the areas of that journey that is directly impacted by digital transformation, but there are many others. By deploying key technologies in your strategy, you're able to improve outcomes for customers with on-time, in-full order fulfilment, simpler payment processing and better delivery experiences to name just a few benefits. Customer service is often a deciding factor between competitors, so ensuring every touchpoint with your company is delivering can be a key brand differentiator.

In addition, digital transformation can help you predict customer needs. Many businesses position themselves as customer-centric, but it’s challenging to focus on your customers’ needs when you haven’t defined what those are. Those needs get even harder to define when they are constantly shifting—this is where timely insights into consumer trends and sales history come in. Predictive forecasting and analytics help you plan your operations for the future by learning from the past, ensuring you deliver what your customers need, when they need it.

8. Roll With the Punches

You're used to dealing with disruptions. With supply chain chaos, geopolitical conflicts and a global pandemic, the last few years have definitely thrown us some curveballs. And some of them you simply can’t see coming. But, what you can do is make sure your business is properly geared to take on whatever tomorrow brings. That is one of the biggest benefits of digital transformation.

The ability to pivot and to do so quickly is becoming a necessity for any business. Increased disruption and market turbulence create opportunity for error in every step of the supply chain and you don't want to be the one that flounders, leaving space for your competitors to capitalise.

Being prepared for the future is critical for any operation, but getting prepared is where digital transformation comes in. Implementing robust technologies and the right software empowers you to tackle the industry as it is today and the challenges that tomorrow may bring without the anxiety of uncertainty. You can scale your business and roll with the punches, and you can do it easily. Because with digital transformation, you already have everything you need.

Get Ready for What's Next, Now^® With Aptean

Ready to start your path to digital transformation? Already started but not sure which step is next?

The benefits of digital transformation go far beyond the list above and the journey will look different for every business. Therefore, a trusted guide is a cornerstone to any successful strategy.

Enter Aptean.

There's a reason our tagline is Ready for What's Next, Now^®. We are relentlessly committed to being a by-your-side partner to our customers, providing innovative software solutions and dedicated support to help you tackle your challenges, today and tomorrow—accelerating growth the entire way. Because your success is our passion.

Our full software suite includes industry-specific ERP solutions, product lifecycle management (PLM) software, transportation management systems and so much more. And, by purchasing many of the solutions from one vendor you can unlock a host of additional digital transformation benefits, such as streamlined integrations, reduced tech stack complexity, increased scalability and further cost savings.

To get started reaping the benefits of digital transformation today contact our team of experts or explore the resources below to find out more.