In a recent interview, we spoke exclusively to Jose Teixeira, Director of Process Management and Center of Excellence North America at Ericsson and Hillel Lehmann, Vice President, Head of Transformation at Nestlé Health Science, about how to take your digital transformation to the next level: the era of ‘hyperautomation’.

In this blog post we showcase Jose and Hillel’s insights on the greatest challenges with taking digital transformation to the next level and how to overcome these challenges, to help you achieve ground-breaking results for your organization.

What are the greatest challenges with taking your digital transformation to the next level, and how do you think these can be addressed? 

   Jose Teixeira, Ericsson

"The current challenge is that digital transformation starts with small islands of change typically based on customer pain points. In this environment, parts of the business start having a good level of automation, but this still creates new bottlenecks in the flow and if not considered properly, can create several problems. For example, one of our first exercises was to have real-time information about our product deliveries for our customers. However, our first attempt failed since our suppliers’ inputs were delayed by a few days and created an incorrect view.

The siloed approach is excellent in the initial stages to demonstrate how companies can increase their customer satisfaction and bring efficiencies quickly. Still, it is not always effective in later stages; a comprehensive approach that focuses on the end-to-end perspective is needed, such as:

1. A strategy with a clear definition of which business/flow is the focus for improvement

2. Objectives and key results that represent the end-to-end perspective

3. End-to-end prioritization and coordination of improvement requirements

It is also crucial for leadership to understand that digital transformation will impact the company's architecture and roles. Failing to understand this will slow down the change and create frustration among the leaders and employees."

    Hillel Lehmann, Nestlé Health Science

"Our digital transformation has given us access to a tremendous amount of data and opportunities. While we are using data at the functional level, the real opportunity is how we leverage the data, digital ecosystem and infrastructure across the business.

The first step is to implement the tools themselves including artificial intelligence, automation and machine learning, then to discover how to take full advantage of the ecosystem, which is where we are at now in our journey. To do this successfully, we needed to take a portfolio approach to automation, look across our brands and our customers, all while continuously gathering and processing insights from our consumers. The next critical step is creating connectivity with our customers, supply chain and consumers. As a consumer-packaged goods (CPG) business, we have customers that we sell to such as retailers, as well as end consumers of our products.

To address the challenges along our digital transformation journey, we are:

1. Deploying IT solutions, to ensure all parts of the business can communicate and collaborate to generate value.

2. Investing a tremendous number of resources and initiatives into training our people, to help them understand the value of this opportunity. It is important to bring your people along for the journey by including them in the process, while helping them to build and develop their skills. With a big part of our transformation journey focused on driving efficiencies for our bottom line, we want to do this in a way that remains true to our people and our organization.

3. Evolving our go-to market strategy commercially to take advantage of our people’s capabilities and determine how we can interact with our customers in new ways, customizing our offering and leveraging technology to learn and automate an evolving strategy as we gain new learnings from the market."

To find out more about Ericsson’s and Nestlé Health Science’s digital transformation journeys…

Download the full interview here!

Want to take your digital transformation to the next level?

Join the world’s industry experts on July 26 - 28, 2022 in San Diego, California to discover how to achieve ground-breaking results for your organization at OPEX Summer 2022.

View the 2022 agenda here!

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