How to optimise your operations

Optimising operations in your business can accelerate your responsiveness, improve service levels, and reduce costs with intelligent processes – and who doesn’t want to achieve any of those benefits at the moment?

Using insight from Microsoft’s latest series of eBooks on Digital Transformation, featuring research by the International Data Corporation (IDC), let’s explore how the iterative process of evolving and streamlining processes is central to maintaining a profitable digital business and leading customers to transform…

Plan, learn from and make informed decisions

Your operations define your business agility. By leveraging technology, you can implement processes that increase efficiency, mitigate risks, reduce costs, and build automation for adaptation, growth, and governance. But for those who don’t include automation in their business, hidden costs are sure to be incurred due to process inefficiencies.

The best approach is to document your internal processes, measure your key performance indicators, and incorporate automation to plan, learn from, and make better decisions. In fact, efficient, automated operations can lead to faster deployment times, and the development of repeatable services, further streamlining operational efficiency.

Those repeatable services, along with your own solutions, become your intellectual property (IP) and enable you to further differentiate your value to customers. Your knowledge and experience can and should be replicated to define your unique value.

Three steps towards optimised operations

1. Measure operational success

In IDC’s global partner survey, operationally transformed partners report experiencing greater than 10% improvement in their KPIs from automation over more traditional partners.

2. Use digital metrics

Re-engineering internal processes by incorporating digital metrics optimises efficiencies and enables your business to be more responsive.

3. Harness the power of automation

In IDC’s global partner survey, gross margins reported by transformed partners are much higher than those reported by partners with lower digital adoption rates.

Be aware that efficiencies drive revenue

It’s important to understand that repeatable processes and best practices can be automated and packaged into your customer solution offerings. After all, the objective must be to get to as automated and as rapid a process or product as possible, because it’s becoming more important to deliver solutions to customers with fewer hours attached.

With the evolution of partner business models, recurring revenue from managed and cloud services is becoming a greater proportion of overall income. Efficiency is imperative in delivering these managed services.

Seek guidance to make real progress

The world of digital transformation is complex – automation, standardisation and repeatability can reduce that complexity for you internally, and for your customers through your solutions. But to truly make progress along the transformation journey, you need a partner to guide you. That’s where Westcoast comes in.

We can show you how to take a longer-term view of operational re-engineering, focus on the key processes first, identify and replicate processes with automation, and use digital KPIs as the new benchmark for success – so don’t hesitate to get in touch.