How to Build a Digital Business: The 4-Step Transformation Approach for SMEs

Cody Liew -

In today’s ever-changing business world, digital transformation gives your business the ability to evolve and thrive. By seeking and adopting innovative concepts for business processes, you’ll be giving your business the digital edge it needs to grow and scale successfully. Work towards your growth goals with this 4-step approach to digital transformation:

1. Understand the benefits of digital transformation 
Take a closer look at your business processes and identify gaps that have a great impact on efficiency and productivity that reflect a real need for change. Accounting functions such as invoice and expense management, collection, and tax reporting are good places to start. Here are 4 benefits you can enjoy:

Transparency and visibility

This paves the way to smart and profitable business decisions by making key financial information available to your executives in real-time. 

Enhanced data security

This ensures data is always backed up and safeguards the confidentiality of your business and client data.Therefore, if you want to ensure the security of your business, you can always search for and install the best VPN that suits your business needs. 

24/7 accessibility 

This supports your mobile workforce and clients by providing on-the-go access to both needful information and individual workflows, ensuring active and seamless collaboration within your accounting department and reduces the time spent passing on back-and-forth communication.

Improved reporting 

Finally, improved reporting standardizes your company’s processes and reduces the risk of manual data entry errors.

2. Identify solutions that match your business needs
Essentially, all these benefits can be reaped with one solution — a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. However, note that as there are multiple ERP solutions in the market, they all come with different features. Be sure the one you eventually choose solves for exactly what you need.

For example, if your accounting department has identified financial reporting as their greatest challenge, look for an ERP accounting solution that efficiently consolidates and reconciles financial information. Using an ERP accounting software that puts financials in a single database will help them accomplish reports without errors or delays. With different functions needing different software to improve efficiency, you will need to have a software asset management (SAM) tool to help manage the acquisition, deployment, usage, accessibility, maintenance, and disposal of software, among other functions. Different SAMs will have different capabilities, so it's important to ensure you go for one that best fits your needs.

Another example is asset management software, especially if your brand uses thousands of images, videos, or sounds across multiple campaigns. By investing in one of many digital asset management solutions, you’ll be able to store, organize, and distribute your assets all on one platform. It’s much easier to collaborate when you go digital.

3. Find the right partners to work with
Like looking for the right solutions for your business, identifying the right partners to work with is essential too. With the constantly changing demands for integration and collaboration, your business will need a solution provider with not just strong and potentially profitable opinions on how SMEs can streamline their operations, but also has the ability to customize a solution for you. This can help you ease into the use of new tools and processes at a pace that works best for your business.

4. Start thinking and acting like a digital business
For your business to go through proper digital transformation, start thinking of a digital program as more than just something that works quietly in the background. Encourage digital advocacy to increase employee buy-in. This facilitates company-wide acceptance and helps the key stakeholders fully embrace the change from manual or on-premise accounting to an automated cloud-based ERP accounting program.

Digital advocacy begins with empowering your employees with knowledge and information so they can understand the benefits of an on-cloud ERP accounting system. Here are 5 practical tips to get you on the right track: 

  1. Gather your employees and share the management’s roadmap for utilizing ERP software. Gather their insights and address their concerns about the new system that will soon be put in place. 
  2. Provide useful resources and proper training to help them feel comfortable with the change. 
  3. Devise an ERP software transition plan that zeroes in on a realistic budget and timeline for training. 
  4. Be open to adjusting your pace of transition based on employees’ feedback so they have ample time to adjust. 
  5. Document the business process changes to help them appreciate the value of an ERP system and how it helps them get things done more efficiently.

Getting everyone on board will give you the confidence to become a digital company equipped with the tools to meet the ever-changing demands of today’s business world. This is essential to keeping up in today’s competitive landscape. Deskera encourages SMEs to improve their business capabilities and continue to tread the path towards innovation and digital culture development.

Schedule a free demo with us to find out how our software can transform your business or contact us at help@deskera.com today.