5 Challenges of Business Transformations

Date: Nov. 1, 2020

Business transformation management, or change management can be a difficult time for any organisation – even more so if executives and senior managements don’t understand the common mistakes that can be made.

This article will address some of the common pitfalls of business transformation, and explain how you can avoid mistakes and drive successful, dynamic change.

Lack of establishing a cohesive vision

Businesses are like a big machine. Every organisation contains several moving parts, and if they’re not pulling in the same direction, a business transformation is going to be problematic. If you consider you have departments dedicated to marketing, sales, accounts, management, warehousing, manufacturing (sometimes all in the same organisation), this is a lot of areas needing to work together cohesively.

When searching for business efficiencies and a better customer experience, all departments need to be in agreement on the transformations that need to take place. It isn’t just a mindset though. True efficiencies can only be gained if you are implanting technology and systems that work in unison across all departments. Using different systems, programs or processes to handle different points of a business is non-productive, and improvements in this area should be the focus of all business transformation.

This is a challenge for managers, who need to have a shared vision and an ability to explain the benefits of the change to their staff.

Not focusing on value adding

The whole purpose of business transformation is to create synergies, find efficiencies, and develop a scalable direction by which the company can grow. However, this sort of strategic planning can’t take place without having the proper insights and analytics at your disposal. Without knowing where your deficiencies and areas of improvement are, it is difficult to formulate a plan to improve.

When you have all of the appropriate data and analysis at your disposal, only then can you begin to plan your transformation. By doing this correctly, you can be assured you are focusing your change efforts into areas that really add value to your business – otherwise you risk making changes purely for the sake of change.

 

Experts are business focused or technical, rarely both

Most business transformation requires some kind of experts or consultants to help you through the process. This sort of enterprise performance management from talented professionals is the perfect way to help establish your vision and goals, while driving and executing the necessary changes.

However, a problem we often see is that business consultants may be experts in the technical side of business transformation, but lack a genuine knowledge of business itself. On the flip side, many business consultants are great at understanding the inner workings of successful organisations, however they simply don’t have the technical knowledge required to advise a company accordingly.

The best solution is to find a company with dedicated professionals who specialise in both the business and technical aspects of business transformation.

Neglecting the people element of change

One of the most important parts of change management is making sure your staff understand and support your proposed changes. The knowledge and dedication your team brings to your business is hard to put a dollar value on, but they are certainly not expendable assets.

By consulting and regularly engaging with staff to ensure they understand the purposes of the change, and the effect it will have on them, you’re going to have a much easier time getting staff to buy in and embrace change with a positive attitude.

 

Lack of enterprise resource planning

When starting to think about business transformation, a solid understanding of your resources is essential. If you don’t know what you’ve got, it’s very hard to determine where you can go. An effective business transformation should be attempting to seamlessly integrate systems to handle all aspects of your business, from customer management systems through to finance, accounting and inventory management.

If you understand your current resources (both staff and system based), you can more easily find efficiencies. With solid enterprise resource planning, you can work out which actions may be automated via robotic process automation – this lets you see where your human staff can be better used to grow your business.

 

Contact the experts

As experts in enterprise resource planning, business management and holding the technical knowledge to assist your business transformation needs, NeeVista are your one-stop shop for driving your business to the next level. We specialise in helping your business grow and manage change, finding efficiencies in your organisation that you never knew existed. Contact us today, and see how we can provide you with the systems and transformation to allow dynamic business growth. We’ll help you seamlessly navigate all the challenges of business transformation.


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Gaurav Sarin

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Gaurav is the Director and Principal Consultant at NeeVista. He helps enterprises leverage the power of data, digital technology, and automation.