Digital transformation is no longer a choice or a fancy, it is a survival need. You can either go digital or become extinct. The whole ecosystem in which business gets conducted today is fast adopting digital.

Why the Journey of Digital Transformation?

Customer's needs are changing with an increasing acceleration. Corporates who are in the business of enabling such customers obviously need to morph themselves to keep pace with fast changing demands.

Technology proliferation in human society has not only increased the reach of a provider to its consumer but also has dissolved the conventional entry barriers for competitors.

Competition has taken a shape that is no longer a zero-sum game and the winner is the one who is constantly increasing its reach, innovating business solutions and isolating its competitors.

How are We Transforming?

Syngenta, whose business is to help the world’s farmers to increase crop quality and yields, and to feed an ever-growing population, through world-class science, deep understanding of growers’ needs and continuous innovation has already embarked on its journey of digital transformation. This calls for a major change, not just in the information management landscape but also business model, processes and above all, in culture. Syngenta recognizes that India’s farmers need more tailored, integrated solutions to make agriculture an economically viable and rewarding way of life.

Our ambition is to bring greater food security in an environmentally sustainable way to an increasingly populous world by creating a worldwide step-change in farm productivity.

The Big Challenge

To help feed an extra 2 billion people by 2050, we’ve set our sights even higher. Our Business Plan has to be focused to help grow more food using fewer resources while protecting nature and helping people in rural communities live better lives. And at the same time, we have to make our own operations more sustainable.

Digital transformation can’t be achieved in isolation. If IT builds a solution and throws it to the business users or business users procure solutions directly from vendor without engaging their internal IT organization, it is simply not going to work.

Reaching out to millions of customers appears to be a simple statement with unambiguous benefits. The whole mechanism of "increased reach" has to be designed keeping in mind the customer experience, partners' interest and increased vulnerability to competition. We have moved from conventional IS infrastructures to cloud based solutions, thereby addressing the need for a reliable and responsive backbone, fast upscale/ downscale abilities and reduced cost of operations. We have brought in digital solutions that empower our sales force globally by providing information to make the right decision at the right moment.

We are already seeing positive benefits to our business and are able to share it with our customers.

The digital transformation journey offered us a good share of challenges too. Our investment in meticulous planning, commitment from senior stakeholders and drive from every corner of the organization helped us navigate through many difficulties. Any “Transformation” poses few fundamental challenges including leadership commitment, mass participation, sustenance of change momentum and communication. Digital Transformation adds a few more including need for constant alignment with changes in the external ecosystem and that of the extended enterprise; and to top it all up, the speed at which we need to change and evolve. An example to substantiate the “need for speed” is that we have migrated about three thousand applications globally onto cloud in just a few months.

Business-abled Participation

Digital transformation can’t be achieved in isolation. If IT builds a solution and throws it to the business users or business users procure solutions directly from vendor without engaging their internal IT organization, it is simply not going to work. It is critical that the digital transformation team has participation from internal IT, business users, partners and even external experts. It has to be the tide that raises all boats together. Simple moves like IT associates co-locating with business and participating in traditionally business driven meetings and committees will increase the rate of success.

Digital Governance Forums

Establishing digital governance forums to understand the demands coming from different corners of the organizations both function, as well as geography and sharing knowledge and resources accordingly helps in cross pollinating and speeding up the transformation. Keeping in constant touch with the evolving industry and experts in other sectors opens up new possibilities.

Challenges of Digital Transformation

  1. People Management and Reskilling

    One of the challenges is moving existing people into new roles. Managing employees transition from their traditional roles to newer ones, reskilling them and empowering them into new roles while keeping the excitement up and overcome the feel of “loss of power” is not easy. Planning, mentoring and communication plays a major role in managing the expectation and lowering conflicts and friction in the target operating model. One of our positive observations is that most people respond with eagerness to reskill themselves with a focus on the ‘Big Picture’, and embark on the new and more challenging journey.

  2. Ideation and Thinking Out-of-the-Box

    This is an exciting time and people are smart to realize that they will benefit themselves as well as the organization if they jump onto this bandwagon. We, as organizations, have to provide right training, strategic direction and opportunities to them. We are establishing digital labs and plan to open it up to anybody who wants to bring in an idea and work on it to create an MVP (minimal viable product) and then scale up. One of the strengths of digitalization poses a challenge by itself. As digitalization literally explodes the data volume generated as well as gathered within an organization, the next question is what do you do with this massive volume of data and where do you get the bandwidth to analyse this data and action upon them. Obviously one has to turn to machines again to analyse this data and make sense out of it. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning plays a major role and is a fundamental enabler if organizations are serious with their digital transformation and want to establish a leading position in the industry and market. Static data definitely is very vital but as business demands quicker response and competitive outcome, analysing data in motion is getting vital.

  3. Need to Streamline Processes for Successful Transformation

    As we get closer to our end customer, it is extremely critical that we respond to their need for information in the shortest possible time. This necessitates that our internal systems and processes be streamlined, optimized and automated.

Before the onset of the Digital Era, the entire Industry was company-centric wherein the Regulatory bodies, Competitors and Channel Partners and even the Customers were getting impacted by what was best for the company or the business.

But today, in the age of the Digital Disruptions and Transformation, the organizations have become customer-centric.

In this age, customer is in control of the journey. They need feedback and are becoming more and more impatient. Companies need to provide the much sought after value to its customers by streamlining the experience, which can start with the automation of customer processes. Be it the Regulatory bodies, the financial institution, the insurance providers, the government agencies, the channel partners, the competitors, or even the company – all are centred on the customer. But, to provide exceptional customer service, streamlining should extend deeper into analytics and AI that provide not only insight but recommended actions such as proactive decision making and next best offers from customer journey prediction.

One of the options that we plan to leverage is Robotic Process Automation (RPA). This is going to ensure that there is uniformity in the execution of our processes, reduced errors and saving of resource bandwidth and cost. RPA is a strategic move to free up resources for more value added activities and directly contributing to the digital transformation. RPA will also elevate customer experience and satisfaction and improve internal productivity as well as service quality.

In Continuation...

We are as well looking into working with several other value-add partners in the market to make the grower’s journey a valuable experience. Customers always prefer to associate with partners who provide end to end experience. Thus integration with downstream functions in a value chain will clearly provide a competitive advantage by reducing the customer’s need to connect with several partners in a disjointed manner.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amit Saha

Amit Saha is an Information Technology expert and a global leader in establishing and managing IT vertical for large international MNCs in North America, Europe and Asia. He is an expert in Envisioning, Innovation, Digital Transformation and Organizational Changes. He is a Mechanical Engineer and holds an MBA from National University of Singapore. He has demonstrated expertise in end to end implementation of varied business solutions and major transformations to enhance business productivity and provide cohesive framework for managing information assets. Having worked with some of the largest organizations in the world including GE Capital, DuPont, UPS, PwC, Novartis, Pfizer and Syngenta, Amit has established global consulting practices and executed programs in cross cultural environment across Asia, Europe and the US.

He is the designer and supporter of several CSR programs that engage volunteers to support the cause of Multiple Sclerosis and Schools for the underprivileged. He is also a distinguished panelist and visiting lecturer to several business and technical schools and delivers on varied topics including Leadership, Digital Transformation, Change Management, Innovation & Technology Management.