TECH@CORE: Building a Digitaly Mature Organisation

To be a resilient and successful enterprise in the 21st century means embracing digital transformation initiatives. However, it can be a challenge to understand where to start, what to focus on, and how to evaluate your organisation’s digital maturity. IMA India recently conducted a survey-based study in partnership with ThoughtWorks, a leading technology and management consultancy, to understand the digital readiness of the organisations. (The survey attracted over 110 responses from foreign and Indian MNCs of various sizes across sectors.) Subsequently, we ran a series of panel discussions across cities, built around our members’ experiences with effecting technological change. This paper summarises the discussions.

Key Takeaways From The Study

• There are no fixed end-points in the journey of digital transformation, but rather, a continuum of ‘digital maturity.’

• However, it is possible to group companies into four distinct stages of maturity, from Basic (least mature) and Organised to Integrated and Core (most mature). 12% fell in the ‘Core’ stage but as many as 61% were one level down, i.e. integrated.

• What can enable companies to transition from ‘Integrated’ to ‘Core’ is spending on digital solutions, embedding ‘digital’ into the core of the business model, and ensuring strong CEO commitment to the digital maturity journey.

Learning From ‘Tech@Core’ Businesses

By offering simple, digitised access to a comprehensive health and wellness ecosystem, Aditya Birla Health Insurance Company Limited (ABHICL) encourages clients to prioritise ‘health first’. What enables this is a strong technology infrastructure that tracks health and wellness and provides 24/7 customer service. In addition to an internal team of experts, ABHICL has brought subject-matter specialists on board, and partners with insure-tech and fintech companies. It has leveraged facial scans, standardised data for calculating health scores and other customised solutions. ABHICL is now working with the Union Health Ministry to develop national digital health IDs for all Indian citizens.

Unilever struggled to integrate data for its procurement line, which includes over 1,500 professionals and more than 10,000 contracts in a single location. Moglix, one of Asia’s fastest-growing supply-chain services companies, created a platform (iCAT) for the FMCG giant to automate and streamline the generation of end-to-end contracts. This helped reduce the number of user inputs, and produced upfront validations that shortened the iterative cycle and centralised all data.

 In just six years, RBL Bank has grown its cards business into one of India’s largest, thanks mainly to a string of technology innovations as well as partnerships with companies like BookMyShow. In parallel, it has set up micro-ATMs at kirana stores to ‘digitally assist’ those at the bottom of the pyramid in making financial transactions. It has also completely digitised its rural-vehicle-loans business, reducing the lag time for transferring money from client to dealer from several days to three hours.

 A few years ago, Continental India was forced to recall cars with defective semiconductor parts from one of its suppliers. Its digital systems, which kept track of all parts and the locations of the plants they were transported to, allowed only the few affected cars to be identified and brought in, rather than many thousands. Today, nearly all of the company’s equipment is connected and Industry 4.0-enabled. The vast data that gets generated is analysed using AI models, which can predict possible flaws. Resultantly, the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) rate has risen from 75% to 82% and scrappage rates have dipped to under 0.1%.

 Industrial conglomerate ABB allows its various divisions to define their own digitisation journeys but has made centralised Finance an overarching theme across businesses. The resultant, highly segmented data enables better decision-making, improves productivity and reduces complexity. Engineers from its facility in Bangalore were dispatched to learn from leading factories globally. The automation that came out of this process allowed for a 30% reduction in floor area, a doubling of production capacity, and a 40% rise in productivity.

Implementing Digitisation

• Actively drive a cultural shift: Reverse mentoring can help leaders understand the nuances of technological change, which they can then marry with their own domain expertise.

• Identify and execute exemplar projects: Build a prototype, then refine it so that it serves as a model for the organisation.

• Walk the ‘Gemba’ walk: Rather than monitoring things from afar, visit the site of the task that needs to be organised, fully understand it by asking the right questions, and tackle issues holistically.

• Celebrate failures as well as successes

• Treat technology as a core function, not a ‘cost-centre’.

• Ensure buy-in: Make three to four vendors or distributors the lead partners, and have them demonstrate what they were able to accomplish as a result of digitisation.