How to Scale Digital Transformation

Most manufacturing companies, large or small, have experienced the thrills of a promising digital pilot. Yet many are still struggling to scale digital transformation effectively, especially those operating across many product categories, regions and factories.

Scaling Digital is one of the toughest challenges assigned to Digital Transformation Leaders and it is no surprise to see these roles becoming more prevalent. But while expectations are high, they often come scattered from different directions and without a clear vision.

So, what principles can Digital Transformation Leaders leverage to best address this challenge? How can they create a virtuous circle that enables their organisations to become self-sufficient? And how should they approach their role along this challenging journey?

This article shares a few principles which, brought together, can serve as a powerful framework to scale your Digital Transformation.

Start with Culture

You can’t whip an organisation through Digital Transformation, instead you have to create a pull from within.

As digital transformation requires to unlearn as much as to learn, it’s critical to help people address three simple questions:

Why is this a priority for my team?
What impact will this have on our roles?
How will you support my team to be successful through this journey?

In my experience, Digital Transformation Leaders have to invest a considerable amount of time regularly engaging all levels of the organisation to identify tensions and opportunities, remove barriers, set expectations, establish partnerships, harness resources and importantly, help change behaviours to drive the vision.

With this in mind, it can be a significant advantage to fill the Digital Transformation Leader role with a person who is not necessarily a technology expert, but rather an accomplished supply chain leader, able to drive the cultural change from within and at all levels of the organization, from factories’ technicians to the CEO.

Focus on the Why

Disrupt yourself or be ready to be disrupted. That is a good mantra for Digital Transformation Leaders. Yet your organization will ask you to be more specific about why they should embrace the journey.

Rather than defining your specific vision against technology, focus on why digital is critical for your employees to better serve your consumers, to drive unprecedented supply chain improvement or to handle increasingly complex regulatory requirements.

By putting your business, consumers and employees at the centre of your digital transformation, and by connecting it to enterprise-wide objectives and priorities, it will become naturally embraced as the way people do their job and not as just another program.

Make Cyber Security a top priority

Your supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

So, before you invest time, resources and credibility deploying the latest hyped technology, it’s worth taking the time to learn more about some key digital foundations such as ICS security, Zero Trust Architecture or Technology Stack, to name a few.

In parallel, ask your practitioners, what priority do your supply chain leaders give to Cyber Security? Do your Cyber Security leaders feel included, supported and valued?

The intent here is to assess how strong your organisation is, both from an expertise and capacity point of view, to stay ahead of the exponential growth of cybersecurity threats, as opposed to just cope with the extenuating daily firefighting that can quickly cause their burnout.

It can take just one unpatched device, out of the thousands a factory can have, to serve as the ground zero for a devastating attack on your whole supply chain. Even with the right experts in place, cybersecurity may not always be a priority.

The bottom line and whatever your starting point is, don’t take cybersecurity for granted. Take personal responsibility to address the cultural, capability and infrastructure gaps needed to keep your supply chain secure and make it an on-going priority of your role.

Put Data at the heart of your strategy

It’s easy to forget that Data, not technology, is the most valuable digital asset that serves your business, consumers and employees.

Ensuring that your data are captured, flowed and activated in an accurate and timely way is paramount to maintain trust in your digital ecosystem. As the old computer science saying goes, ‘garbage in, garbage out.’

An endless source of critical opportunities, data governance encompasses not just data architecture but also all the processes, roles and cultural expectations that ensure the integrity of your data.

Ask yourself, do we have clear data standards? How do we ensure they are known, understood and embraced by our data practitioners? Have we put as much attention on roles like data stewards or data engineers, as we have done with data scientists and data analysts?

Interestingly, data architecture can sometimes be confused with data governance. Hence it can be really insightful to penetrate how different or complementary are the data architecture strategies used by your IT and Engineering Teams, knowing they typically work at different ends of the technology stack and of the data flow.

Manage your digital portfolio like a product portfolio

As an accomplished Supply Chain leader, you know the importance of being in control of your product portfolio. So, you expect your people to be able to answer the following questions:

How many product skus do you have?
What value does each sku bring to your business?
What are the unmet consumer needs behind each sku?
Can you scale the reach of some skus to more Consumers?
What is the total cost of each sku and how can you optimize it?

The same holds true for your digital portfolio. Just replace product sku by digital solution and consumers by employees and ask these same questions when you tour your factories. If your factories are not in control of their digital portfolio, you hardly can.

Whatever system you choose to manage your digital portfolio, make sure you have one source of truth that all your factories and practitioners commit to keep current and accurate.

Embrace Lean

The essence of Lean is to eliminate waste. But while digital is often leveraged as a lean accelerator, lean is not always applied to digital.

As Lean has been embraced by Manufacturing for many years, it can be your most powerful ally to challenge the paradigms that get in the way of scaling digital effectively.

First, streamline and standardize before you digitalize. Use lean to streamline your core work processes, challenging any useless step that does not add value, then standardize and finally digitalize.

Second, embrace a less is more mindset. You certainly already have a few proven digital platforms already established. Make sure they are properly leveraged before you start adding new solutions.

Finally, use lean innovation to develop new digital solutions. Get comfortable using a Minimum Viable Product approach to learn and to iterate fast, with real life users, instead of shooting for perfection.

Establish a Digital Talent Ecosystem

If it takes a whole village to grow a child, it certainly takes a whole organization to scale digital transformation.

Even if you’ve done a great job at developing a compelling vision, you still need to bring together an incredibly diverse pool of talents, and to have them collaborate naturally, effectively and efficiently. This is where establishing a Digital Talent Ecosystem can make a huge difference. One of the sources of inspirations I have used in my previous role came from an HBR article that outlined How Spotify Balances Employee Autonomy and Accountability.

Building on these insights and to keep things simple, I advise you consider three core principles when establishing your ecosystem:

Bring all talents in: Make of your ecosystem an integrator of talents, able to support a Buy, Build, Borrow and Bridge approach. As you do so, relentlessly drive diversity and inclusion to ensure people feel valued for their contributions.
Drive accountability: Design your ecosystem in a way that fosters collaboration across your talents, nurtures their mutual interdependency and reinforces their ownership of the vision, strategies and outputs.
Unleash talents: Establish principles, rather than rules, to drive decisions at the lowest level as possible. Leave enough autonomy for experimentation. Create a growth mindset culture, which encourages to share and to learn from failure.

Keep it Simple… and Exciting!

Because Digital Transformation is a long and complex journey, it’s worth paying attention to a few areas that will keep people inspired, energised and thriving along the way.

Beware of the language barrier: Use a blend of plain language, storytelling and analogies to decipher the often cryptic and intimidating aspects of the digital lingo.
Break down the journey: Develop a high-level roadmap to keep your organization focused not just on the end vision, but also on the various phases of progress you expect to drive along the way.
Celebrate progress: Not just in your business output measures but also in the capability areas, whether they relate to upskilling organisation, upgrading infrastructure or establishing new systems.
Develop talents: Go beyond just coaching and empowering your team, by also challenging obsolete career system norms, so that digital and supply chain talents can thrive and grow as One Team.
Bring the outside in: Reach out to industry-wide networks. Empower your key leaders to represent you in these forums and to drive learning and reapplication into your own organization.

Above everything else and if I had to keep only one overarching principle, it is that the Secret to Digital is Human.

Eric Enselme is a Supply Chain and Innovation Expert with a three-decade career at Procter & Gamble, where he served as Global Vice President leading the Innovation Program Management Office and spearheading the Supply Chain Digital Transformation of P&G’s Fabric & Home Care sector. Eric is also an Executive Fellow for the World Economic Forum’s Center for Advanced of Manufacturing and Supply Chains, and he serves as an Advisory Board member of the Global Lighthouse Network. He is passionate about leading transformation, developing talents, and driving Equality & Inclusion.

References

Learn more

Daniel CamaraApril 1, 2021

How to Scale Digital Transformation

Most manufacturing companies, large or small, have experienced the thrills of a promising digital pilot. Yet many are still struggling to scale digital transformation effectively, especially those operating across many product categories, regions and factories.

Scaling Digital is one of the toughest challenges assigned to Digital Transformation Leaders and it is no surprise to see these roles becoming more prevalent. But while expectations are high, they often come scattered from different directions and without a clear vision.

So, what principles can Digital Transformation Leaders leverage to best address this challenge? How can they create a virtuous circle that enables their organisations to become self-sufficient? And how should they approach their role along this challenging journey?

This article shares a few principles which, brought together, can serve as a powerful framework to scale your Digital Transformation.

Start with Culture

You can’t whip an organisation through Digital Transformation, instead you have to create a pull from within.

As digital transformation requires to unlearn as much as to learn, it’s critical to help people address three simple questions:

Why is this a priority for my team?

What impact will this have on our roles?

How will you support my team to be successful through this journey?

Focus on the Why

Disrupt yourself or be ready to be disrupted. That is a good mantra for Digital Transformation Leaders. Yet your organization will ask you to be more specific about why they should embrace the journey.

Rather than defining your specific vision against technology, focus on why digital is critical for your employees to better serve your consumers, to drive unprecedented supply chain improvement or to handle increasingly complex regulatory requirements.

By putting your business, consumers and employees at the centre of your digital transformation, and by connecting it to enterprise-wide objectives and priorities, it will become naturally embraced as the way people do their job and not as just another program.

Make Cyber Security a top priority

Your supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

So, before you invest time, resources and credibility deploying the latest hyped technology, it’s worth taking the time to learn more about some key digital foundations such as ICS security, Zero Trust Architecture or Technology Stack, to name a few.

In parallel, ask your practitioners, what priority do your supply chain leaders give to Cyber Security? Do your Cyber Security leaders feel included, supported and valued?

The intent here is to assess how strong your organisation is, both from an expertise and capacity point of view, to stay ahead of the exponential growth of cybersecurity threats, as opposed to just cope with the extenuating daily firefighting that can quickly cause their burnout.

It can take just one unpatched device, out of the thousands a factory can have, to serve as the ground zero for a devastating attack on your whole supply chain. Even with the right experts in place, cybersecurity may not always be a priority.

The bottom line and whatever your starting point is, don’t take cybersecurity for granted. Take personal responsibility to address the cultural, capability and infrastructure gaps needed to keep your supply chain secure and make it an on-going priority of your role.

Put Data at the heart of your strategy

It’s easy to forget that Data, not technology, is the most valuable digital asset that serves your business, consumers and employees.

Ensuring that your data are captured, flowed and activated in an accurate and timely way is paramount to maintain trust in your digital ecosystem. As the old computer science saying goes, ‘garbage in, garbage out.’

An endless source of critical opportunities, data governance encompasses not just data architecture but also all the processes, roles and cultural expectations that ensure the integrity of your data.

Ask yourself, do we have clear data standards? How do we ensure they are known, understood and embraced by our data practitioners? Have we put as much attention on roles like data stewards or data engineers, as we have done with data scientists and data analysts?

Manage your digital portfolio like a product portfolio

As an accomplished Supply Chain leader, you know the importance of being in control of your product portfolio. So, you expect your people to be able to answer the following questions:

How many product skus do you have?

What value does each sku bring to your business?

What are the unmet consumer needs behind each sku?

Can you scale the reach of some skus to more Consumers?

What is the total cost of each sku and how can you optimize it?

The same holds true for your digital portfolio. Just replace product sku by digital solution and consumers by employees and ask these same questions when you tour your factories. If your factories are not in control of their digital portfolio, you hardly can.

Whatever system you choose to manage your digital portfolio, make sure you have one source of truth that all your factories and practitioners commit to keep current and accurate.

Embrace Lean

The essence of Lean is to eliminate waste. But while digital is often leveraged as a lean accelerator, lean is not always applied to digital.

As Lean has been embraced by Manufacturing for many years, it can be your most powerful ally to challenge the paradigms that get in the way of scaling digital effectively.

First, streamline and standardize before you digitalize. Use lean to streamline your core work processes, challenging any useless step that does not add value, then standardize and finally digitalize.

Second, embrace a less is more mindset. You certainly already have a few proven digital platforms already established. Make sure they are properly leveraged before you start adding new solutions.

Finally, use lean innovation to develop new digital solutions. Get comfortable using a Minimum Viable Product approach to learn and to iterate fast, with real life users, instead of shooting for perfection.

Establish a Digital Talent Ecosystem

If it takes a whole village to grow a child, it certainly takes a whole organization to scale digital transformation.

Building on these insights and to keep things simple, I advise you consider three core principles when establishing your ecosystem:

Bring all talents in: Make of your ecosystem an integrator of talents, able to support a Buy, Build, Borrow and Bridge approach. As you do so, relentlessly drive diversity and inclusion to ensure people feel valued for their contributions.

Drive accountability: Design your ecosystem in a way that fosters collaboration across your talents, nurtures their mutual interdependency and reinforces their ownership of the vision, strategies and outputs.

Unleash talents: Establish principles, rather than rules, to drive decisions at the lowest level as possible. Leave enough autonomy for experimentation. Create a growth mindset culture, which encourages to share and to learn from failure.

Keep it Simple… and Exciting!

Because Digital Transformation is a long and complex journey, it’s worth paying attention to a few areas that will keep people inspired, energised and thriving along the way.

Beware of the language barrier: Use a blend of plain language, storytelling and analogies to decipher the often cryptic and intimidating aspects of the digital lingo.

Break down the journey: Develop a high-level roadmap to keep your organization focused not just on the end vision, but also on the various phases of progress you expect to drive along the way.

Celebrate progress: Not just in your business output measures but also in the capability areas, whether they relate to upskilling organisation, upgrading infrastructure or establishing new systems.

Develop talents: Go beyond just coaching and empowering your team, by also challenging obsolete career system norms, so that digital and supply chain talents can thrive and grow as One Team.

Bring the outside in: Reach out to industry-wide networks. Empower your key leaders to represent you in these forums and to drive learning and reapplication into your own organization.

Above everything else and if I had to keep only one overarching principle, it is that the Secret to Digital is Human.

References

Manpower – Build, Buy, Borrow, Bridge: how to solve the talent shortage in your organization﻿

Manpower – Build, Buy, Borrow, Bridge: how to solve the talent shortage in your organization