1. What is Digital Transformation?
Digital Transformation, a popular word in other parts of the world, has become a hot topic in China in recent years. According to the statistics, in China's 14th Five-Year Plan and Outline, the word "digital" appears 25 times, while other related terms like Digital Society, Digital Twin, Digital Technology, etc., come into view 60+ times.
Digitalization is not equal to Informatization. Informatization refers to a groundbreaking movement of making full use of information technology to develop and utilize information resources to facilitate information exchange and knowledge sharing to promote high-quality economic growth and drive economic and social transformation (Source: China's Informatization Development Strategy 2006-2020). With the Internet as its core, Informatization focuses on information connectivity. And digitalization works around several digital technologies, such as big data, cloud computing, AI, etc., to drive the global change with digits.
Digital transformation refers to an enterprise's proactive, systemic, and holistic transformation amid the global digital revolution, in response to the changing market demands in the digital economy, to promote its sustainable development. It aims to use the new-generation digital technologies in a broader range to help build a digital twin enterprise featuring whole perceptions, seamless connections, and high-level intelligence to simulate, optimize and digitally rebuild the physical enterprise, thus reshaping the traditional management, business, and commercial models to drive the business success and growth.
2. What does Digital Transformation do?
Digital transformation involves using digital technologies to transform and reshape an enterprise’s strategy system, business model, business process, production and operation organizational structure, or any other holistically and systemically based on the converted and upgraded digitalized enterprise. It works in three main steps, i.e., conversion, integration, and reconstruction.
Conversion refers to using new-generation information and communication technologies to collect data instantly from the enterprise’s physical business, production, operation, management, or other activities. Then convert all business processes into data, information, and knowledge that can be read, stored, and evaluated by computers.
Integration refers to integrating and interconnection of all types of data from the enterprise’s physical businesses based on information network and data management technology. It allows the data from all areas of the enterprise to be transmitted and shared simultaneously, thus achieving the true convergence of the information technology and the enterprise’s business management.
Reconstruction refers to the rebuilding of a new enterprise architecture under the digital economy to support the enterprise’s development sustainably based on the business data, as well as a digitalized, interconnected, and intelligent enterprise, to accelerate the transformation and reshaping of its traditional organization, system, designing, R&D, production, operation, management, marketing, and any other activities.
3. Why do we need Digital Transformation?
In a broad sense, digital transformation represents a huge opportunity for China to rise among its peers and overtake the corner. It not only allows the government to improve social governance but also helps enterprises increase efficiency. Today, technology is undergoing rapid development, and business models are constantly changing. Several major forces are driving enterprises' digital transformation.
1) User experience is increasingly important
In the past, supplies governed demands; but now, demands guide supplies. The landscape significantly changes! In the digital era, the ability to respond quickly to changing demands becomes more important. The agricultural and industrial economy has gone. Now we are facing a service and experience economy.
2) Market competition is becoming fiercer
The fiercer competition may result from various factors, such as rapid structure change, a broader gap in strength, higher intelligence level, etc. Failing to keep up with the trend would leave you behind. As business efficiency increases due to digitalization, efficiency has become an enterprise's core competitiveness. It will determine its position in the entire market ecosystem.
3) Enterprises are at a crossroad in innovation
Innovation is not an easy job, and significant technological breakthroughs are also hard to achieve. Many enterprises, even large IT companies, are now facing tough challenges and declining business performance. With the digital transformation, enterprises will see structural changes, and their traditional organization, system, designing, R&D, production, operation, management, business processes, and other activities will be reshaped and reconstructed.
In the past, digitalization is optional for enterprises, but now it has become mandatory. Any enterprise has to embrace digital transformation through its digitalization strategy.
4. Why should we choose RPA as the starting point of Digital Transformation?
Today, most enterprises are in the early or planning stage of digital transformation. Some of them have not clear targets or holistic strategic planning in building their ideal intelligent systems. The more direct challenge in front of them should be a pile of legacy application systems when it comes to digital transformation. How should we deal with them? For non-digital native enterprises, decommissioning all those systems and reconstructing them from scratch would be costly, and they would lose their valuable experience accumulated over the years. It is more likely to see failure in their businesses just when they complete the reconstruction.
Unlike AI intelligence and 5G technologies, the RPA process automation robot is easier to deploy at a lower cost. It can implement in a shorter time, and with lower investments, than SaaS-based office automation systems like OA, sales, customer services, etc. The RPA robot is non-disruptive, which means it won’t interrupt the current management systems like ERP. It can realize the data migration and circulation across systems even without using interfaces.
On the other hand, some enterprises still have to invest a lot of time and resources in their daily routines, such as tax declaration, account debit, business processing, payroll management, and data collection. These cumbersome and repetitive tasks constitute roadblocks for employees’ further development and add extra costs to the enterprise. The RPA technology can help automate those regular and repetitive tasks in place of human labor, thus freeing up many human resources to take more advantageous positions and accelerating the enterprise digital transformation pace.
RPA has prominent advantages over other digital transformation technologies in terms of applicability, development cycle, implementation cost, application efficiency, and complexity. For a quick understanding of RPA, please go to RPA at a Glance.
iBPMS at a glance: click iBPMS.
