A guide to successfully implementing digital projects

When it comes to digitisation, the real question isn’t “whether” but “how.” That’s because digitisation positively impacts a company’s economic sustainability by simplifying and automating many workflows as well as optimising time and costs. In a skilled trade business, for example, fast digital communication with mobile employees, customers, and suppliers can provide enormous benefits in how fast a job is completed.

Find out how to apply digitisation ideas, concepts, and procedures in a targeted manner.

Whether you are working with your own team or with customers and business partners, digitisation offers an opportunity to simplify collaboration and place it more firmly in the foreground.

Digital ways of working are increasingly replacing traditional (paper-based) systems. Sharing knowledge of specialized aspects across customers and jobs is becoming easier, since business-related information can be provided comprehensively in the form of data beyond departmental boundaries. Mobile employees from installation and service teams can also be integrated at any time. This makes it possible to maintain a complete overview of the status of all projects, jobs, and resources.

Involving business partners digitally allows you to keep feedback, documents, deadlines, and jobs visible and available at all times directly and for all relevant people without wasting time.

The digital schedule

Digitising workflows requires a simple, well structured, and clearly organized “schedule” aimed at the requirements of your company and its daily business.

Before drawing up the digitisation schedule, you should make sure you know exactly where you stand, since familiarity with your own digital maturity is the basis for all further steps. A wide range of entities offer online maturity checks. A well formulated check has a comprehensive evaluation to give you a usable guideline on where you stand when it comes to digitisation.

The findings obtained through the maturity determination highlight the areas of your company where you should focus your digitisation efforts and how to develop an individual approach to digital transformation. When drawing up the digital schedule, it is crucial to take simple steps on the path to this transformation.

Implementing a structured digitisation plan

The goal of digital transformation is to achieve visible and measurable results from the very beginning. In order to succeed, you need to document, analyse, and, if possible, simplify the workflows to be digitised. If the necessary resources – that is, knowledge and time – are not available in your company, there is no reason why you should not leave this step up to the expertise of a business consultant.

That way, you can get answers to the following questions, for instance:

How can we improve teamwork within the company digitally?

• What IT services can we place in the cloud instead of using a permanently installed license-based software?
• How can we make better use of work time by (automatically) processing and analysing data?
• How can we integrate mobile employees digitally?

You can also draw up a structured and detailed plan for deciding which areas of the company or which processes are to be digitised based on which requirements.

By the way, every industry and every discipline has companies that are already deriving enormous benefit from digitised workflows. These digital pioneers can inspire you and serve as a model for your own procedural and implementation strategies.

Working with experts

By working with expert service providers, such as software and cloud service providers, you can obtain all the digital tools you need to implement your new processes and ways of working.

Collaborating with a consultant from your own industry association, trade organization, or competent chamber of industry and commerce is a good idea, especially if you don’t have sufficient IT expertise in-house. These experts will assist you, for example, in drawing up a list of requirements (specifications) to be met by the IT solutions and IT service providers.

Systematically collecting knowledge

An important consideration: To gain a better understanding of how to develop projects and activities during the course of your company’s digital transformation, you need to raise the necessary awareness within your enterprise, acquire knowledge and provide it internally.

You can do this, for example, with a freely expandable collection of knowledge and materials within your company, one that partners, managers, and employees can use as a guide as they “discover” their own digital ways of working and further develop it in the context of their own duties.

Regular meetings are also useful to check the incoming information and evaluate its relevance to your own approach. The digitisation knowledge available in the company should also be actively expanded in a targeted manner, for example, through additional topic-specific training sessions or workshops.

Conclusion

The approaches and practical tips listed here demonstrate that digitisation is not rocket science that requires in-depth IT knowledge and the budget of a large corporation. What’s crucial is to keep an open mind to changes and have a structured approach. Technology is ultimately only a resource that makes modern, easier work possible.

At the PRACTICAL GUIDE TO DIGITISATION Forum being held at FENSTERBAU FRONTALE + HOLZ-HANDWERK 2024, you can attend expert interviews that will show you how to integrate modern digital systems into your everyday business activities to automate routine tasks and speed up processes.

For information on the topics of all the practical interviews and discussions, including times and information on the participants, consult the event schedule for the PRACTICAL GUIDE TO DIGITISATION Forum being held from 19 to 22 March 2024.