By Dan French
The main challenge is how best to apply the digital and AI technologies that drive genuine P&L value and economic productivity.
For starters, it requires more than purely optimising groups of ‘silo’ functional activities. End-to-end business process orientation, communication, understanding, insight, collaboration and alignment are the critical enablers for transformation, digitisation and integration – and thus the delivery of real value to the business. Without end-to-end thinking and execution we are destined to continue to fail to meet the high expectations of our leaders, our businesses and their shareholders.
With all this in mind, but with no silver bullets, here are the top 10 transformation acceleration ‘plays’ – practical strategies, skills and habits – to impact on your revenue and profit growth, plus working capital optimisation:
1. What Problem Are We Trying To Solve?
We must do better at asking WHY?. What are the compelling business problems or opportunities that the company seeks to prioritise that can define an end-state for a transformation. These business problems and opportunities can usually be traced to the P&L or balance sheet – what does good look like in this new world? Only then we can identify the value streams, the end-to-end processes that drive these outcomes. If you don’t understand the end-to-end business process, you’re not transforming, you are gambling.
2. End-to-End Process (Value Stream) Thinking
Outcome thinking is KEY to customer experience. It’s about getting a bigger view and understanding what goes on in each silo helps us identify what should change and what shouldn’t. End-to-end processes operate across the enterprise, but many key tasks and latent business values lurk in the ‘blind spots’ at the edges. Better integration between functional silos improves both performance and customer experience in delivering the business outcome of the end-to-end process.
3. The Dual Operating Model
This requires us simultaneously to consider and optimise the specific services provided into the end-to-end process (such as supplier sourcing or accounts payable) as well as the cross-functional end-to-end process or business cycle itself. Whilst we may own the delivery of a specific service or activity stream, it is rare/impossible to be responsible a full end-to-end process – so it’s more about balancing silo service efficiencies with end-to-end process optimisation.
4. What’s In It For Me?
Considering the benefits and efforts for each stakeholder is crucial to driving any meaningful change across a team, department, function, or organisation. Gaining support is an exercise in asking yourself, what is the case for change for each stakeholder and how can I make that case the most attractive? This may require some creative thinking because there are many different motivating factors depending on who you are speaking with – learning, aspiration, reward and achievement.
5. The Coalition And Trust Equation
We need to form a powerful, cross-functional coalition of buy-in across the business and sometimes with external customers and suppliers. This means getting different corporate functions, operating units, regions, customers, suppliers, executive stakeholders, IT and HR aligned – so that the objectives and desire for process excellence can be achieved. This requires us to develop and reinforce our emotional intelligence, as it involves questions that are thought provoking and require a level of trust to honestly share.
6. Focus on Why?
Why does this value stream (end-to-end process) exist and what value does it deliver to whom? Why are we trying to transform or improve? Being clear on these questions is a powerful platform for everything that follows – because the answers will be nuanced. Remember, the essential, existential need to understand and agree what good looks like is for ALL stakeholder and participant segments. Don’t even start thinking about KPIs until clear on this.
7. Think Outside-In – Like A CFO
We all tend to habitually see our world from inside-out, focussed on the machinery related to our own role and performance measures, activities, standards, vocabulary. Outside-In thinking, however, is about our real purpose and answers the ultimate question why? So, when considering process improvements and technology projects, think how would the CFO view this project, initiative or activity? What is the P&L or working capital impact and in what timeframe?
8. The Four Levers Of Business Value
If we are to create genuinely sustainable business value, we need to contribute, directly or indirectly – and be able to draw the connecting line – to core business outcomes. These four key levers (revenue growth, customer value, operating margin, asset efficiency) represent the most fundamental business outcomes that a CFO will recognise. They all benefit from the fact that GBS / Shared Services is the central, common place to manage core financial processes and data.
9. Clear Vision And Roadmap With 100 Day Plans
A vision is required to capture the collective aspirational outcome that the coalition has agreed, but it needs to be pragmatic in delivery and exploit the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) in facilitating process and experience improvement in rapid cycles. This is one of the main scorecards that will be referenced when assessing the effectiveness of end-to-end process strategy. Any transformation strategy needs to be the aggregation of a series of 100-day plans, each delivering demonstrable, economic value.
10. The Digital And AI Agenda
When looking at any process, to ascertain the appropriate use of AI or other technology, we must look at the component tasks and judge the class of activity they represent and what type of technology support is needed – logical, analytical, communication, humanistic? This will help determine our automation versus augmentation toolbox and the best options from deterministic (conditional) logic, probabilistic (analytical) AI, generative (conversational) AI, or enterprise workflow/actionflow (including Agentic AI).
Follow these top 10 tips to get a better handle on how applying the right technologies to the right parts of our redesigned process, will achieve effective results. Put simply, the best technology driven transformations are great process transformations, with hard earned simplicity for the customer, streamlined activities across the value chain (end-to-end process) and easier-to-use technology and customer experience.
About the Author
Dan French is CEO of Consider Solutions, who specialise in delivering performance outcome improvements through a proprietary end-to-end business process approach and smarter use of technology in the context of human behaviour, data insights and decision support. They work with leading global brands like Aston Martin, BT, Bombardier, Church & Dwight, Lanxess, Mattel, Sony Music, Starbucks and UNICEF.
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