Digital transformation might be considered a benefit-led strategy, whereby companies only invest in digitisation once they understand the benefits involved.

In reality, it’s the way forward, regardless of the benefits involved and moving from paper to digital is one form of digitisation that will become increasingly frequent in large organisations.

The path to digital transformation can be split into 4 broad stages; understand, educate, execute and improve. The initial 2 steps are all about understanding what’s currently going on in your business processes, thinking about what can be done and then creating a business case for it.

For example, a company might review the business processes in HR and decide that too much time is spent on processing and filing printed documents and there is a realisation that this process can be digitised, and possibly even automated.

Here are 5 areas your business should prioritise in the drive to digitise.

Beyond the first 2 stages is where digital transformation gets interesting - it’s the point at which actions are taken to digitise the processes, review what’s been done and further improve processes.

It’s also at the latter 2 stages where an organisation can begin to measure the gain of digital transformation and provide return on investment to the company.

Measuring the gain

An integral part of digital transformation is the enhanced performance measurement capabilities. Using a mix of business process dashboards, it’s possible to monitor key business data and measure the return on investment from digitisation.

Once you can start to measure the results and see the performance of the digital transformation strategy, it’s then possible to start working on ways to improve the processes further.

The business process dashboards can usually be customised to focus on the metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) that are most important to your company. The use of these analytics and intelligence helps the company stay responsive and agile, allowing them to adapt to change and make improvements as needed.

The data is best shown in an accessible single view across disparate sets of management data and presented in easy-to-read graphical formats. This keeps the data easy to read and analyse and alert tools and real-time data analytics can help enable executives to make timely and accurate decisions.

This form of data driven action in digital transformation can help to drive enhanced efficiency and more streamlined processes and there can be benefits to your cost base.

Further to this, it’s also possible to enable executives to manage their businesses more strategically, alert to unfolding problems, ready to exploit new opportunities.

As you continue on your journey towards measuring these gains, you might find that your managed print services (MPS) provider plays a big part in the transition from paper to digital processes and can provide the analytics to identify which processes and inefficient and should be digitised.

Digital transformation won’t happen overnight but the process of digitising inefficient processes can bring a lot of great benefits. Measuring the gain is a great way to ensure what’s been put in place is working and to take action on areas that aren’t working or need more thinking to provide a better return.