What Does Digital Transformation Really Mean?

Adoption of digital transformation solutions has skyrocketed over the past few years with their market size expected to reach USD 8.92 trillion by 2030 according to Fortune Business Insights.

What’s more? According to research done by Zippia 70% of organizations are working on a digital transformation strategy or already have one.

But as companies continue to race to adopt the latest technologies, it’s important to distinguish the difference between mere adoption and using this tech to bring forth impactful change.

Updating your tech without updating your processes is like repainting a house and calling it new!

Just as a freshly painted house may still have a faulty foundation, processes and operations can still be dated despite a digital makeover.

Digital transformation only occurs when companies understand how their processes can change with new technologies to support them.

Take the management of invoices as an example. These documents are frequently referenced and contain bounds of business-critical information. Moving them from a physical file cabinet to a digital tree of folders would involve a newer technology, but would ultimately be the same process with little return on investment.

Just as you’d have to sift through drawers and paper dividers for a physical cabinet, so too would you have to sift through digital folders when storing them electronically.

But with an Enterprise Content Management solution (ECM), information on the invoice such as vendor name, date, and invoice number is digitally indexed allowing the document to be instantly searched and retrieved.

This process saves significant amounts of time that can be put towards other business activities, creating a tangible return on investment. It’s also important to note that digital transformation is gradual and ever-expanding, so once this new process sees success, it can be expanded and improved upon.

“Digital transformation is gradual and ever-expanding”

Using the same example of an invoice we can take a look at a different process: indexing within the new solution. Keying in index data manually helps save time when the document needs to be retrieved, but ultimately takes some initial time as well.

Using key free indexing, a tool that comes with ECM solutions like Square 9’s GlobalSearch, this process can be greatly improved. Simply clicking a button and highlighting the information will populate the index fields instantaneously, saving additional time and reducing errors that can result from typing.

This process can be further transformed by removing the need to work with each invoice individually. Document Capture solutions lift index information as invoices are scanned and can feed that data to financial solutions like QuickBooks for bill creation and resource management.

TransformAI, Square 9’s document capture solution for accounts payable, can even reduce professional services costs for implementing document capture by eliminating templates that, in the past, needed to be created for each new vendor and format.

Expanding your digital transformation with document capture technology can save tremendous amounts of time, but once again, it relies on changing your processes as well. While the process for manual data entry would involve keying in the data and reviewing it for quality, document capture shortens this process by entering the data automatically. The resulting, updated process takes advantage of the new technology to transform the way you work.

So how do you implement a digital transformation?

In short, effective digital transformations result from being mindful of your processes and how new technologies can improve them. Setting measurable goals with metrics like productivity and customer service ratings can indicate whether your return on investment is strong.

And implementing these changes gradually allows you to keep measuring these metrics and scaling up your solution when you see opportunities to create more value.

Most importantly though, during any new implementation, a positive impact has to be felt throughout your organization, which is why communicating change to your employees and training them on the solution are essential pieces to ensuring a successful digital transformation.

Square 9 is an award-winning developer of scalable, user-friendly solutions for document-related processes. Using enterprise content management, document capture, workflow automation, and web forms systems, Square 9 delivers solutions with incredible service and complementary training. For more information, contact us.