This year’s technology trends highlighted the Intelligent Enterprise as a strategy which applied digital technologies in order to enable innovation. Many businesses began their digital transformation by including artificial intelligence, extended reality, Big Data, blockchain, and IoT into their repertoire.
But successful businesses in 2019 won’t just implement technology but embed it end-to-end throughout their processes to maintain growth and prepare for disruption. Forming next-generation practices ensure that businesses in 2019 can launch their Intelligent Enterprise successfully and remain proactive when faced with disruptive forces.
Embed Intelligence into Every Network and Process
Business “best-practice” is the general guide to put your best foot forward. Predictions about how businesses should be running and how to improve current operations are topics revisited at the close of each year. But the reality is that with organisations operating in such a dynamic global landscape, changes are driven by technology and old business models are not ready to adapt to new innovations. Embedding intelligence into business processes will lead to cohesive operations where fully integrated systems combine finance, HR, Sales, and Procurement/Sourcing.
Geographe, a precision engineering company, implemented SAP S/4HANA to streamline processes and future-proof their business. Shedding legacy software was fundamental for Geographe to improve business outcomes, reach growth targets and achieve superior customer service. By adopting emerging technologies, the organisation focused on building collaborative networks using an Intelligent digital core that enables their employees to be more agile in their customer service and to access information on the cloud anywhere. This cloud technology empowers employees to make data-driven decisions and find appropriate solutions within minutes.
Moving Onwards and Upwards
We’re operating in a multi-generational workforce and this presents the opportunity to consistently educate and up-skill your employees for the challenges ahead. Businesses focused on being adaptable, agile, and proactive invest in the learning of their teams in order for people work collaboratively across departments. Technology serves as the catalyst and as businesses move towards automation and away from manual processes, developing skills to use these will be central in creating a culture of innovation.
Defining Next-Generation Practices
Next-generation practices use a next-generation solution. Building a culture of innovation and implementing digital technologies is a two-way street. Traditionally, businesses would have incorporated technology and pushed a new user experience to customers. Presently and more commonly into the future, we’ll see more situations where customers not only use an organisation’s products and services, but feed information and access back. This type of innovation impacts people directly in a much quicker way and businesses will eventually navigate their own course to the Intelligent Enterprise.
