July 2020 – Management Events

July 24, 2020

After COVID-19: The New Manufacturing Normals

It’s a well-known fact that many organizations outsource their industrial and manufacturing operations to countries across the globe for lower labor and production costs.

The era of hyper-globalization brought about the creation of global value chains and high interdependencies between businesses and suppliers, interconnecting the world’s economies and supply chains.

However, the emergence of the coronavirus exposed the vulnerabilities of such interconnectivity, with lockdowns, closed borders and slowed productions causing worldwide supply shortages.

The unprecedented disruption has caused manufacturers to rethink their strategy for post-COVID-19 business continuity and growth, from the near-term actions of accelerating adoptions of digital technologies to shifting their operations for a longer-term solution.

INDUSTRY REINVENTION

Over 75% of the world’s global manufacturing outputs were impacted by the pandemic, and throughout the past months, it was evident that digitally-matured organizations have greater resilience in enduring such crises.

Unfortunately, not all manufacturers were technologically prepared for the effects of the outbreak, but many took the chance to quickly ‘adapt and adopt’.

Enhancing Data Infrastructure

From additive manufacturing to extended realities, Industrial Digital Technologies (IDT) were used in full force during the pandemic, proving how these smart technologies can bring resilient productivity to manufacturers in times of crisis. Among the IDTs, data infrastructure in particular is seen as a strategic asset.

“The COVID-19 crisis has made having access to reliable, real-time data an absolute necessity for coordinating the right medical response. In the near future, data will become an even more strategic resource across multiple facets of business and society.”

– What Will Manufacturing’s New Normal Be After COVID-19?

IndustryWeek

In fact, in a recent survey, Management Events discovered that over 50% of manufacturers have placed data science and analytics as their topmost technology adoption for 2021 while almost all the surveyed manufacturing executives agreed that data-driven digital business models are imperative for long-term survival.

The greater emphasis on data also means a higher adoption of data connectivity, which include the deployments and accelerations of 5G networks, Industrial IoT, cloud platforms, and cybersecurity.

Intelligent Automation & Robotics

With physical-distancing measures still ongoing for the foreseeable future, automation and robotics are key necessities in the post-coronavirus manufacturing industry. However, the machines of the future are expected to be highly adaptable and reprogrammable through artificial intelligence (AI) and software.

“Rather than having a very complex hardware manufacturing,” Maurizo Cremonini, head of marketing at COMAU, commented in an interview, “the trend is going to very lean factories where the robotized and automatized cells are managed by software, loading different recipes as needed so they can easily modify the production process.”

Suppliers such as Bright Machines, a software and robotics company, offer highly roboticized machinery, combining software, machine learning, and adaptive robotics for a more responsive production line.

“[The] key to unlocking the promise of intelligent automation,” Amar Hanspal, CEO of Bright Machines explained in an article, “is the connection of individual machines to an AI-powered software layer that configures, monitors and manages machines and operations, creating programmable and autonomous factories. We call this approach Software-Defined Manufacturing.”

According to Research and Market’s report on COVID-19’s impact on the smart manufacturing market, a positive growth in collaborative robots is still forecasted for 2020 albeit lesser than the pre-virus prediction while Fortune Business Insights expects the global industrial robots market to reach an estimate of $66.5 billion by 2027.

Improving Digital Capabilities

Over the past months, under-resourced manufacturing teams faced great challenges in solving COVID-19-related issues.

With necessity driving determination and innovation, the manufacturing industry found itself rapidly changing, adopting technology and enhancing digital capabilities to solve issues of distance, remote visibility and labor shortage.

There is no doubt that the industry will see five years of innovation in the next 18 months as manufacturers move to boost efficiency, cost-effectiveness, optimization and competitiveness, or risk falling behind their counterparts.

SHIFTING OUT OF CHINA

According to an article by the Oxford Business Group, representatives of the world’s largest economies are “publicly encouraging companies to shift their manufacturing operations out of China as part of plans to diversify global industry.”

But it’s important to note that the relocation is not wholly dependent on the pandemic.

Even before the outbreak, businesses were contemplating relocating or expanding their factories and manufacturing operations due to reasons that included trade wars, high tariffs, rising costs, and other pressures. COVID-19 only hastened the move.

However, experts relate that shifting out of China may not be as easy as it seems.

“Most companies cannot afford to consider a wholesale relocation of their factories out of China or replace their Chinese sourcing vendors,” as mentioned by multidisciplinary professional services firm, Dezan Shira & Associates.

“This is because supply chain infrastructure takes time to establish and China is at the heart of most of the world’s production, sourcing, and procurement needs.”

Instead, it seems that businesses are adopting a ‘China+1” strategy, where China remains as the main source of operations with diversification in other countries.

“Ultimately where we’re heading to is more fragmented manufacturing — many small factories of the world.”

– Gerry Mattios, expert vice president of Bain & Company, Singapore,

China May Become One Of Many Hubs As Companies Diversify Manufacturing After Coronavirus Shock

Spreading Throughout Southeast Asia

Based on Kearney’s annual Reshoring Index, the report shows that U.S. manufacturing imports are shifting away from China to other Asian low-cost countries (LCCs), with Vietnam taking the lead.

Out of the $31 billion in U.S. imports from Asian LCCs, Vietnam absorbed 46% of the imports due to the multiple benefits the country offers to manufacturers, such as:

Access to the ASEAN free trade area,
International trade pacts with Asia, EU and U.S.,
Major developments in industrial infrastructure, and
Lower labor costs than China.

Apple has already stated that the organization is seeking to relocate 30% of their AirPods productions to Vietnam, while Google and Microsoft are shifting parts of their manufacturing lines to Vietnam and Thailand.

In spite of the increased relocation to Vietnam, Kearney’s report noted that “not all of Vietnam’s gains represent a true relocation of production from China to Vietnam” as part of the shifts may be “temporary tactics to avoid tariffs.”

Other Asian countries that are benefiting from the diversification or actively courting manufacturers include the Philippines, India, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.

India, for instance, is enticing global smartphone manufacturers to set up factories with its new incentive program and a 462,000-hectare land pool for 10 sectors. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, a defence industrial complex has been created to encourage manufacturing plants from defence firms.

Moving Closer To Home

Countries such as Japan, the U.S. and U.K. as well as in the Europe continent are already underway with their plans for a local or regional manufacturing network.

In April of 2020, Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, unveiled a massive $992 billion stimulus package, whereby $2.2 billion have been allocated to help local organizations shift their manufacturing plants back to Japan.

The U.S., on the other hand, had previously shown increasing manufacturing shifts to Mexico in 2019, according to the Kearney report. The finding is further strengthened by the 2020 International Trade and Trends in Mexico Survey Report by Foley & Lardner LLP, whereby respondents from the manufacturing, automotive and technology industries plan to move their business to Mexico within the next one to five years.

“80% of those considering or planning a move to Mexico from another international location intend to do so within the next two years [while] two-thirds of respondents [not doing business internationally] are planning to begin operating in Mexico within the next year.”

– U.S. Executives Enthusiastic About Expanding Business in Mexico,

Forbes

For the U.K., the head of economics at the British Chamber of Commerce, Suren Thiru, commented to CNBC in May 2020 that “some U.K. businesses were already shortening their supply chains after coronavirus-related disruptions had affected operations.”

As for Europe, the sentiment of local productions is expressed in DigitalEurope’s paper on relaunching manufacturing in a post-COVID-19 world. The paper recommended increasing additive manufacturing technologies to substitute globally sourced parts with parts that are locally produced.

Meanwhile, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt are hailed as competitive manufacturing hubs for European businesses seeking nearshore alternatives.

Reshoring and Microfactories

For manufacturers seeking to reshore their facilities, the adoption of digital innovation is extremely crucial.

“A successful reshoring strategy must be coupled with a digital manufacturing strategy. If the current pandemic has demonstrated anything, it is the power of digital technologies to keep companies productive, even in the worst of times.”

– Paul Haimes, VP of Business Development & Technical Sales at PTC,

Manufacturers should ‘reshore’ and reinvent themselves post-COVID

As countries increase their reshoring efforts, the question that consistently arises is ‘Are there enough digitally-skilled workers?’

To quote Cherie Wong, the general manager of Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT analytics services, “There is a shortage of expertise. Skilled people in developed countries don’t think about careers in manufacturing.”

“But now there is a trend towards reshoring,” she spoke at an analyst meeting by Siemens Digital Industries, “For that, we have to be thinking about microfactories.”

Microfactories, as explained by research and analysis firm, FutureBridge, are small-to-medium factories that are highly automated and technologically advanced, capable of a wide range of processes.

Through these agile and digitized microfactories, manufacturers are able to call upon local contract facilities for cost-effective productions and for handling mass customization and ‘markets of one’.

“You can automate processes without building in rigidity,” stated Alastair Orchard, digital enterprise vice president at Siemens, in an article by The Institution of Engineering and Technology. “You can’t easily personalize products halfway around the world, you need to run those lines onshore. With local production, you can scale down to a lot size of one.”

Overcoming Challenges

Although onshoring, nearshoring and offshoring from China are trending topics among manufacturers, business experts predict that the shift might be easier said than done.

From the availability of specialized skills and technologies to the breaking of a highly complex network of interdependencies and ‘deep-tiering’ of supply chains, manufacturers are keeping these concerns in mind as they seek to build a more sustainable and resilient value chain.

In the meantime, it’s expected that China will remain as the main manufacturing center while companies continue with a China+1 strategy and move towards industrial diversification.

MANUFACTURING RESILIENCE

The pandemic laid bare facts to manufacturers that they cannot stand idly by the traditional models of old and be content with existing global value chains.

With a potentially volatile demand environment over the horizon, manufacturers have to make plans for agile and flexible manufacturing processes while constantly reassessing and innovating their business models for the future.

“The resilience of [an] industry and its ability to perform and adjust to shocks hinges on its diverse, dynamic, innovative and collaborative capacity, which emerges from its industrial commons.”

– Why Innovative Manufacturing And Circularity Are Key For A Resilient Manufacturing Industry Post-COVID-19,

United Nations Industrial Development Organization

There are still other areas that have yet to be covered – workforce empowerment and upskilling, circular manufacturing models, and strategic inventory reserves – but it’s obvious that the post-coronavirus manufacturing industry has to take many factors into consideration in order to start a new era in resilience, sustainability and self-sufficiency.

July 21, 2020

The Rising Concerns of CIOs Amid Pandemic

Before the start of this decade, multiple studies and surveys predicted that CIOs will have a unique set of key concerns and priorities which they should prepare for. According to CIO Insider, the top focus areas for CIOs in 2020 would be talent, culture, and organizational challenges. Acuvate reported similar trends with the addition of IT-related initiatives, while Adobe highlighted customer experience amongst others.

Fast forward to the second quarter of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and unprecedented circumstances strike the world, which then begs for a question: do the predictions from these studies still stand true? Do CIOs’ priorities remain unchanged or are CIOs pivoting to different initiatives to support their business continuity plan (BCP)?

Let’s take a look at what challenges and developments preoccupied CIOs over the past 4 months and the business areas and technologies that have proved vital for organizations’ business continuity planning.

Cloud Migration

The recent crisis saw remote working as the norm as employees were made to quarantine themselves during this pandemic. This transition caused businesses to face difficulties in communicating, accessing data, and business analysis.

Henceforth, CIOs needed to change the legacy system and speed up cloud migrations to continue efficient operations and propel into an increasingly competitive business landscape. For a comprehensive BCP, CIOs also had to adopt cloud computing technology promptly to accommodate remote working and achieve better collaboration among stakeholders. Management Events’ latest Executive Trend (ET) Survey H2 2020* revealed that around 86% of businesses were looking to migrate their workload to the cloud as the rapid digital transformation was made prevalent, aligned with the current trend of modern technological advances.

Cybersecurity Risks

According to Entrepreneur, the FBI reported that the cybercrime rate in the United States has increased 300 percent since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Meantime, the U.N disarmament chief, Izumi Nakamatsu also said that cybercrime is on the rise “with a 600% increase in malicious emails during the current crisis”.

The rise of cybercrime is attributed to several reasons including chaos around the pandemic, massive layoffs, and the increase of remote workers’ online activities with multiple networks that have either limited basic security measures or the lack of it. CIOs face challenges in educating employees about cyber threats and maintaining system security, primarily when it is accessed externally. Insights from our ET Survey 2020 revealed that 92% of businesses find cybersecurity awareness training for employees essential and deemed it to be a priority.

Interpol reported that the focus shift to health crisis was a probable cause for the shortfall of cybersecurity which made it easier for cybercriminals to attack computer networks and systems of the users individually and even an organization as a whole.

As business operations are forced to move to digital space and therefore exposed to online vulnerabilities, it is recommended that CIOs enhance their cybersecurity systems to minimize risks and incorporate them in their BCPs. The board of directors should always involve CIOs in decision making regarding security which includes policies, processes, people, as well as developing and innovating technology.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

According to Lomit Patel, vice president of growth at IMVU, from detecting the first coronavirus outbreak to reducing operational dependencies by the surge of automation in all industries, artificial intelligence plays a big part in driving growth during post-pandemic setting.

It is not a surprise for an organization to make sudden cuts in budgeting (with our own Executive Trend (ET) Survey* showing 48.1% of decision-makers focusing on cashflow preservation for business continuity) to survive financially during the pandemic which includes the unfortunate decisions of retrenchment that lead to an overload of work for remaining employees, but at the same time calls for more efficient management of certain tasks that can be automated. Subsequently, as a long-term BCP infrastructure, CIOs are looking into accelerating the adoption of AI and ML to boost process automation into their daily operations and to replace human labor. It is best to involve all areas for the automation strategy as an alternative solution to reduce operational costs and increase productivity.

Organizations that already utilize AI and ML as part of their services and products have to retrain their models due to the unusual customer/user behavior during the pandemic. Incidentally, this creates an opportunity for CIOs to explore and establish better artificial empathy (AE).

Acute Innovation

The crisis is impacting multiple businesses across industries causing drastic changes in customer behavior, supply, and demand worldwide. As a matter of fact, it is eye-opening to witness how companies respond proactively to adapt to current situations. For some businesses, adjusting means investing in new products and solutions to support their revenues. Various innovations were produced after merely less than a month of product development, creating a new business paradigm.

As an example, General Motors (GM) recently made a shift in its production line into manufacturing medical equipment such as breathing ventilators. This transformation allows GM to generate $489.4 million from only its production of ventilators even when shutting down car production. It is commendable that GM is taking advantage of its resources and technology as an alternative to a new stream of revenue, and at the same time, contributing to the cause of battling the current pandemic. Considering how digital the world today is, and how much industries depend on technologies, it is prevalent that CIOs play an essential role in accelerating new innovations to provide businesses with a competitive edge at high speed and low cost.

The Unforeseen Agent

While the CIOs’ focus areas for the year 2020 have stayed relatively close to the predictions, COVID-19 has become the unforeseen agent that added urgency and criticality to digitalization and business transformation. The pandemic forced CIOs to accelerate their initiatives and take urgent actions to ensure competitiveness in their businesses. Organizations and workers that had been traditionally slow to adopt new technologies found themselves having to adapt quickly to the challenges of this operational paradigm or lag behind and close the shop.

CIOs are at the heart of every company’s business operation, but their role has evolved; from helping a company run better and faster to ultimately become an imperative figure that keeps a business resilient with changing times.

July 14, 2020

Beyond RPA – It’s Time To Take A Holistic Approach To Finance Automation

RPA, or robotic process automation, in recent years has become somewhat of a synonym to the automation software category. Its application in finance, though, is restricted to the rules-based, consistent, and template-driven tasks, which are recurring and foreseeable.

But how do we go beyond automating isolated tasks to automating entire processes? How do we address the automation of highly manual ad-hoc and non-linear activities, which are at the core of financial close process and more broadly speaking record-to-report (R2R) area?

“Substantial effort related to the R2R process focuses on recording data, correcting errors, reconciling accounts, and performing month-end closing tasks to provide accurate and timely financial reporting.

Supporting business with faster and better insights based on accurate financial reporting is the modern-day challenge of the finance function. Overcoming it with automation while keeping function costs down is what we do for our customers,” says Clive Jefferies, product manager at Aico, The Financial Close Automation Platform.

A Holistic Vision Of Finance Automation

For an enterprise-level organisation, the core problem of improving finance function efficiency is beyond simply automating a set of specific tasks. The reality is far more complex and cannot be significantly improved without addressing the entire processes.

In a holistic vision of finance automation, one action should impact the entire process in one seamless workflow. For example, in R2R, it would mean the ability to:

Automatically link closing tasks and related journal entries.
Automatically create new journals directly from closing tasks.
Reconcile accounts by linking them back to the journals, which have related supporting evidence and approvals.
Follow and optimise R2R activities in real-time from a dashboard on an individual, team, legal entity or whole group level.
Validate journal data in real-time and make postings directly to General Ledger within seconds.

From an IT point of view, all of this efficiency comes down to the size of your company’s system architecture, in other words, how many different systems your company uses for R2R management. Fewer tools with live inter-connectivity is the ultimate goal here from an IT perspective.

Your Organization DNA At The Core Of Automation Solution

A lot of variables like your unique organizational processes, local tax regulations and currencies, your group company network and ERP systems, are directly going to affect how you choose to automate and optimize your finance function. It is therefore critical that the automation solution you choose supports your unique finance function DNA.

But perhaps the single most crucial ability is to have real-time access to your ERP system master data to support you at every step of the process. For example, a live connection to your ERP systems allows you to make adjustments or fix errors instantly from one financial close platform user interface.

About Aico

Aico is a Finnish software company. Our product is an intelligent financial close automation platform, which covers vital functions of R2R – close task management, journal entries, account reconciliation and financial requests like manual payments.

Our product’s unique real-time ERP system integration ability sets us apart from conventional R2R and financial close automation solutions.

Over the last ten years, we have been helping enterprise-level organisations across the Nordics to automate complex manual processes, implement smart workflows, enforce custom compliance guidelines and reduce ERP system integration complexities.

In 2020, we have successfully delivered our product to our first enterprise-level customers in the Netherlands and are continually introducing our product throughout Europe.

For more information about Aico, please visit aico.ai or view some of our resources below:

July 9, 2020

Enterprise Architecture, The Agile Way!

Agile Architecture; what is it and why is it the new way to help your business grow?

In the early 1990s, people felt the need to break with the traditional “waterfall method”. They began a search for more practice-oriented ways to deliver software, which over the years led to Agile development.

Agile spread around the world and has had a huge impact on how organizations are structured and how they transform towards the future. The big challenge now is to stay in control over your organization’s transformation in this rapidly changing and flexible environment.

EA Goes Agile

The mapping out of the entire organization and recording, maintaining, using and improving information to support transformation usually takes a long time. But organizations need to be able to change faster and in shorter cycles in order to keep up with the speed of innovation nowadays.

So how can we keep Enterprise Architecture (EA) relevant and valuable in this fast changing world?

By combining Agile and Architecture.

This allows you to change in a more structured and secured way. It reduces risk, as well as increases the business impact you make by better aligning the projects with strategy. You work towards a centralized repository in which the current situation has been completely worked out. From there, you can start working in a structured way on the future desired state, which is based on decentralized investment, and not yet fully determined, so it can change along the way.

The future state is separated into fragmented bits, created throughout the organization, and is orchestrated by the architect into a whole in the central Enterprise Architecture Management Repository.

This means that the stakeholders can directly contribute to the current state architecture. It also means the architecture has to be fully integrated with Project (Portfolio) Management, Change Management, and with Business Process Management, Application (Portfolio) Management and Data Management, resulting in operational stakeholders taking responsibility for their changes. It is important that this can be done easily and quickly in everybody’s own language.

The Architect Becomes A Director

The Enterprise Architect now orchestrates teams of specialists responsible for the operation and monitors if projects meet the requirements from the set frameworks of conditions, principles and guidelines that fit the organization. He/she orchestrates the progress of projects in multiple phases or sprints.

The Enterprise Architect is now responsible for making sure all projects deliver products that contribute to the organization’s objectives while being in harmony with each other (aligned operation & strategy). Projects are delivered in the short term, while always keeping the long-term objective in mind.

And this requires close collaboration with the executive teams of the organization: In what direction is our organization heading? How do the changes in both our internal and external environment influence our strategy? How can we constantly adapt to these changes?

In an Agile Architecture driven organization, the architect presents decision-ready scenarios to the executive board, so that strategy can be adapted not on a yearly basis, but on a weekly or monthly basis, while heading towards the projected goals for that year.

With Agile Architecture, the focus is much more on a strategic level; managing the details is distributed to the people familiar with and responsible for those details; mostly in the operation. The architect is more a director and is closer to the teams that implement the projects.

The architect will work together more with these teams in order to keep track of the situation and the transformation and to make sure that nobody deviates too far from the set principles and guidelines, while constantly being open to improvements and adaptations.

In order to be able to integrate all those project architectures with your Enterprise Architecture, you need the right tooling.

BlueDolphin is a collaboration platform in which the various stakeholders can easily work on different projects, all in their own way and in their own language, while constantly contributing to the central repository.

BlueDolphin helps map out the current situation and displays the road to the future by providing an understanding of the current situation.

The power of BlueDolphin is that you can facilitate all those different roles on the same knowledge platform. The information is aligned within one central repository, and can be dynamically visualized in such a way that it’s understood by every stakeholder in the organization, allowing everyone to work from one and the same up-to-date ‘reality’. This saves a great deal of time and reduces the need for endless communication.

This way, you can use Agile Architecture to make your organization much more flexible and resilient at the same time.

July 1, 2020

Dr Gero Decker: The Path To Customer Experience Excellence

With today’s increased focus on customer experience (CX), it’s hard to believe that customers were once seen as an afterthought to products.

But business process management (BPM) software vendor, Signavio, has long understood the importance of client satisfaction, building services around their ‘passion’ statement: Create products that people love to use.

Deep diving into the customer-centricity of Signavio, Co-Founder and CEO Dr Gero Decker shares with Management Events on the characteristics of a client-oriented organization and the aspects of customer experience excellence.

A SNIPPET OF SIGNAVIO

Offering solutions such as BPM tech, RPA and ERP since 2009, Signavio has been constantly recognized for their exceptional services.

Some notable awards and rankings include 2018 Inc. 5000 Europe, Deloitte Technology Fast 50 for 3 years, 2015 EY Founders Ranking, and the BPM2ThePeople Award for their BPM project with the daycare centre, Kita Am See Großbettlingen.

DEFINING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

“Concentrate on the areas that can have the greatest effect
on customer experience.”

There are many factors that contribute to customer satisfaction, from the company’s culture and staff capabilities to the processes and systems of the organization. For Signavio, what defines customer experience?

“All of these factors play a role in customer experience,” Dr Decker (picture left) relates. “Of course, some things are beyond the control of individual employees or companies. Just look at the unprecedented impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“That’s why it’s essential to concentrate on areas that can have the greatest effect on customer experience, often for a relatively low effort,” he discloses.

“Focus on your customer journey, including all the interactions, moments of truth and emotions. Then, concentrate on your processes that deliver against that journey.”

“Your capabilities and systems flow from this strong foundation, which then work together to reinforce a customer-centric approach, and help your company culture move from customer service to customer excellence.”

ESSENTIAL CUSTOMER-CENTRIC CHARACTERISTICS

“Build lasting relationships that are more than mere interactions.”

With customer satisfaction becoming an increasing differentiator among businesses, organizations are focusing on effective CX strategies to gain competitive advantage.

In fact, according to Gartner, two thirds of surveyed marketing leaders state that they are “currently competing partly or mainly on the basis of customer experience.” But what makes an organization truly customer-centric?

“It’s all about building lasting relationships, which are more than mere interactions: it’s about trust,” Dr Decker emphasizes. “The only way to ensure success is to reorient everything your business does around the customer.”

He further stresses how employees are an integral part of executing a successful customer journey and helping to improve customer experience.

“Does everyone in your organization know
what the company’s customer-oriented goals and objectives are?”

“Do they understand what they do and how they do it impacts the customer? Do they have access to all the information they need to serve the customer immediately?”

“And, crucially,” Dr Decker questions, “do they have the authority and ability to solve problems as they arise, without constant checks for permission?”

“If your answer to all these is ‘yes’, then you’re probably well on the way to becoming a customer-centric organization. If your answer is ‘no’, your customer experience efforts are likely too disconnected from your operational excellence efforts to be genuinely effective.”

CREATING A SEAMLESS CUSTOMER JOURNEY

“You need a ‘single source of truth’.”

Today, businesses are using multiple platforms to communicate and market to their target audience. But if the company doesn’t have a proper customer journey map in place, the omnichannel experience can be inconsistent and unsatisfactory.

Based on industry research, over 70% of customers see experience as a key part of their purchasing decision, but many of them state that companies deliver only an ‘ok’ experience.

Other research found that a high majority of customers expect consistent interactions across channels. So how can organizations provide a steady and seamless customer experience?

“Beyond the potent combination of process mining with CJM technology,” Dr Decker shares, “the most important capability to deliver a seamless customer experience is clear communication across your business.”

“This is not only with the customers themselves, but internally.”

“You need a ‘single source of truth’, a standard that is understood by all staff, and delivered consistently no matter where and how customers interact with your business.”

“At the same time,” he informs, “a common understanding of “how we do things” will allow for clearer communication within your business, and give customer-focused staff and projects a solid foundation.”

“Enabling widespread communication means leaders can pull insights from across their organizations, and make more informed decisions that will ultimately benefit the customers.”

CONNECTING CUSTOMER FOCUS & OPERATIONS

“Companies need to bring together the Customer Experience practice
with their Operational Excellence efforts.”

The interaction between people and businesses has roots all the way to the pre-industrial revolution, when relationship-building was simple and a loyal customer base was typical of every business.

While CX has a much broader meaning today, what is truly new about building client relations and customer experience excellence?

“Indeed, customer experience is not a new topic,” Dr Decker agrees, “But what is different now is that companies realize that they need to bring together the Customer Experience practice with their Operational Excellence efforts.”

“As Kasper Rorstedt, the CEO of adidas, said:
Customer Experience is not just about a sexy front-end
but equally as much about great processes.”

“By viewing customer-centric imperatives through the lens of operational excellence, the connection between customers, their touchpoints, and your underlying business processes is always visible and traceable.”

“In other words,” he explains, “to succeed in becoming truly customer-centric, we must connect our business processes directly to the drive to delight customers.”

“This means refreshing our way of thinking about interactions, and focusing on deep changes down to the process level.”

“Being able to manage and fill process gaps across an entire company lays the groundwork for leadership to clearly understand the necessary changes for improved customer relationships.”

TOWARDS INTELLIGENT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

“Digital plays a critical role in retrieving customer data.”

Since the explosion of big data and digital technologies, industries from retail to healthcare have been utilizing analytics and adopting intelligent innovations to improve their customer experience.

As Dr Decker proclaims, “We have much more data available to understand our customers. On a daily basis, we can see customer behavior changing, sentiments going up or down, and the effects of changes that we implement in our processes.”

But how does digital capabilities and smart technologies help in delivering great customer experience?

“Digital plays a critical role in retrieving relevant data,” Dr Decker elaborates.

“On top of that, intelligent technology allows us to implement more customer touchpoints than ever.”

“Twenty years ago, the webshop was a big novelty, allowing customers to get informed and place orders 24/7. Now, almost all touchpoints can be automated, for instance through apps, in-product messaging and conversational interfaces.”

“The big realization these days, however, is that technology not only provides for a great user interface to the customer but that it is at least as critical for providing smooth and fast operations in the background.”

The findings from an IDC research further confirms Dr Decker’s point, which found that a majority of CEOs are shifting their focus to more modern and digital strategies to deliver better experiences to their customers.

SIGNAVIO’S CX APPROACH

“Customer experience is not simply a project; it’s the way we do business.”

Every company has their own unique CX strategy, and the recent coronavirus outbreak has brought significant changes in customer behaviour, pushing businesses to re-emphasize their customer relations.

But for Signavio, customer experience has always been a top priority.

“We pride ourselves on offering a customer experience second to none, and high levels of satisfaction to our own customers,” Dr Decker expresses. “For us—as it should be for all organizations—customer experience is not simply a project; it is the way we do business.”

“We closely track customer engagement, success and relationship health so that we can proactively influence the relationships we have with our customers, and rally everyone on the team behind the important moments of truth for our customers.”

“For us, now more than ever is the time to maintain customer trust, and work to add customer value while communicating with empathy.”

To support businesses during these trying times, Signavio is offering a free 30-day trial of their all-in-one Business Transformation Suite that helps optimize business processes and drive intelligent transformation.

From real-time insights to quick operational change, the Business Transformation Suite offers customers continuous improvements and efficiency to their daily business tasks.