Insight

What Is Digital Transformation, and How Can It Help Your Procurement Department?

January 23, 2023

For your procurement department to remain competitive in a fast-moving digital world, you need to be equipped with the right tools to stay ahead of the curve. Digital transformation helps you do just that. Keep reading to learn more about this process and how it can help your business thrive.

What Digital Transformation Is and Isn’t

Digital transformation is the integration of your people, processes, and technology within one or more areas of the source-to-pay process, which can change how your business operates and delivers value to stakeholders and executives. It should include aligning your organizational culture, optimizing processes, utilizing technology to automate manual tasks, improving your internal customer experience, and increasing agility and responsiveness to change.

However, there are a few common misconceptions about digital transformation that you need to understand before diving into the process.

Digital transformation is not simply the adoption of a few new technologies or tools. Although many people see the transformation process as a project with a definitive start and end date, it is actually a comprehensive and ongoing iterative process that involves many areas of your organization.

Digital transformation is also not just about adopting technology for technology’s sake. It needs to be driven by a clear business strategy and a desire to improve your business’s operations. It’s not just about implementing the latest and greatest technologies but about first identifying needed process improvements, planning for change, then aligning technology to facilitate your improvements.

Finally, digital transformation takes time—it doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a long-term commitment and a willingness to embrace change and continuously adapt to new technologies and market conditions. For digital transformation to be successful, you need strong leadership and an internal culture open to innovation and experimentation. Otherwise, you are just implementing software.

The Purpose of Digital Transformation

There are many drivers for digital transformation, including the need to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and increase competitiveness. In today’s digital age, procurement departments need to be agile and have the capacity to manage multiple strategic initiatives in parallel. Digital transformation helps your business do this by enabling it to leverage digital tools and technologies to improve the internal customer experience, streamline business processes, and drive innovation.

The purpose of digital transformation is to help businesses maintain a competitive advantage in today’s fast-paced, global supply chain by enabling them to adapt to new market conditions, customer needs, and changes in the competitive landscape.

Not Sure If Your Business Needs Digital Transformation?

If your business is struggling with outdated manual processes, a lack of data visibility or insufficient internal collaboration between departments like sourcing, procurement, and accounts payable, digital transformation can help. Explore our blog to discover five signs your business needs a comprehensive digital transformation.

How the Digital Transformation Process Works

For many procurement decision-makers, digital transformation can be overwhelming. However, the digital transformation process typically involves a few critical steps that, when followed methodically, can transform your business into a robust market leader.

Assess the Current State of Your Business and Scope Out the Project – The first step of the digital transformation process involves evaluating your existing procurement processes and your current use of technology and identifying areas where processes can be improved, and technology can be leveraged to drive business value. This stage of the process looks at which manual processes can be automated, where there are gaps in your data, and more.
Develop a Digital Transformation Strategy – Next, you need to set clear goals and objectives for your digital transformation initiative and identify the technologies and tools used to achieve those goals. Before you begin integrating new digital technologies and processes, you need to clearly understand where you need to go and how these tools will help you get there.
Implement the Digital Transformation – The third step of the digital transformation process involves deploying the technologies and tools identified in the strategy. It also involves training employees on new technologies and processes and managing change effectively
Measure and Optimize Your Transformation – After implementation, you need to track the progress of your transformation initiative and adjust it as necessary to ensure it meets your desired business outcomes. This step of the process may also involve ongoing optimization efforts to improve the use of technology within your organization.
Mature Your Processes Over Time – As mentioned above, digital transformation doesn’t have a defined start and end date—you need to continually assess and improve your use of technology to get the most out of your transformation initiative. Unfortunately, many businesses go live with new software and end the process there. They don’t fully integrate new processes into their workflow, which can leave several benefits on the table. You need to align your internal culture with your new processes and technologies for a successful transformation.

Benefits of Digital Transformation

A successful business transformation provides your business with several benefits, including:

Fewer Manual Tasks and Reduced Human Error: One of the most significant benefits of performing a digital transformation is that you can eliminate a number of manual processes. This drastically reduces human error and allows your entire organization to run smoothly.
Increased Efficiency and Productivity: By automating processes and using digital tools, your business can reduce the time and effort required to complete tasks. This frees up employees to focus on more value-added activities and helps cut overall costs.
Improved Customer Experience: Digital technologies can help you better understand your internal stakeholders. This allows you to exceed customer expectations across the board.
Data-Driven Insights and Improved Visibility: Digital transformation allows you to collect and analyze data across departments, which improves overall visibility. This provides crucial business intelligence to make strategic, informed decisions.
Encourages Collaboration and Communication: By integrating new technologies, you can eliminate communication errors, internal redundancies, and more while gaining access to collaborative tools that give you a competitive advantage. For example, sourcing, procurement, and accounts payable departments can utilize the same data and easily collaborate, allowing you to transact faster and more accurately.
Greater Agility and Flexibility: With innovative tools fully integrated into your optimized business processes, you can respond quickly to changing market conditions and customer needs.

Digital Transformation Services from Velocity Procurement

At Velocity Procurement, we’re committed to helping businesses gain a competitive advantage by providing comprehensive digital transformation services. We pride ourselves on scoping projects right from the start to provide you with the best experience and results possible.