In any competitive market, being proactive can make all the difference. For example, developing new application features that make your processes more efficient can save time and free your team to focus on more challenging tasks.
Change isn’t easy if you’re going it alone. You need the right processes and skills in place from the off. While this isn’t impossible to achieve, it doesn’t happen overnight. Even for the best organisations, it can take time, effort, and significant resources.
There is another way: working with the right partner with the right expertise to help you drive meaningful change.
At CACI, we’ve spent decades helping clients navigate and pre-empt shifting markets. Here are three ways we’ve helped them to be more proactive.
#1 – ELIMINATING COMPLEXITY AND MANUAL DATA ENTRY
While it can be tempting to stick with the old ways of doing things, this will almost certainly breed unnecessary complexity and manual processes.
Take a crowded public place for example. One of our clients is required by health and safety law to monitor and record footfall. It’s a critical part of the company’s understanding of congestion at its sites – and how it can make changes to reduce it.
But when the standard method of recording this information was pen and paper, submitted periodically, our client found that its staff were spending so much time filling out paperwork that they struggled to carry out their other daily routines.
Our solution was simple: a digital app that replaced paper forms and allowed staff to upload a variety of supporting documents – removing tedious, manual data entry, and freeing valuable people to focus on other tasks.
#2 – USING TECHNOLOGY TO SOLVE CRITICAL PROBLEMS
In healthcare, preventative treatment can catch potential issues before they become bigger problems, helping people live healthier lives. What’s more, a healthier population means less pressure on the NHS and more evenly distributed budgets.
University College London Hospitals NHS Foundations Trust (UCLH) identified that without appropriate screening, some of the most vulnerable groups in the UK were at risk of contracting TB – a disease which can be a significant challenge to treat if not discovered in its early stages.
So we worked closely with UCLH to develop its internet tele-radiology information and communication system (ITRICS), which helps to identify, manage, support, and treat patients while they wait (a particular advantage for those without fixed addresses who are hard to track down).
By identifying cases more quickly and with greater accuracy, UCLH is now able to provide effective treatment on the spot. This reduces the pressure on its outreach teams and helping them serve more people when they need it most.
Bringing new applications to market quickly is not just helpful in healthcare. It’s also helped Waitrose & Partners deliver a more seamless customer shopping experience.
We worked together to consolidate the retailer’s multi-device ecosystem – including providing comprehensive ongoing device support – and now it’s easy for Waitrose to develop a wide range of applications for any customer mobile device.
#3 – ANTICIPATING ISSUES TO HELP MITIGATE THEIR IMPACT
Understanding upcoming changes that could impact your operations – and taking proactive action to mitigate those effects in advance – can help you avoid potential problems and stay ahead of the competition.
In the retail sector, a sudden change to something seemingly straightforward, like the VAT rate, could have huge legal implications, literally overnight. And we helped Waitrose & Partners to prepare for exactly this.
Changing product prices to reflect a tax change sounds simple in theory, but the reality is hundreds of thousands of products that each need updating at once – with no room for error.
That’s where batch processing comes in. By making these price changes in sensibly sized batches (usually overnight to limit point-of-sale disruption), our client avoided painful database errors that could have risked non-compliance and customer dissatisfaction.
We also helped Waitrose & Partners to prepare for the food import challenges posed by Brexit. By using stock smoothing techniques where the locations of the most buying were analysed and supplied accordingly, the retailer has been able to reduce the impact of perishable food disruption – and it now uses the same technique to deal with adverse weather events that threaten suppliers both at home and abroad.
PROACTIVE CHANGES, COUNTLESS BENEFITS
Often, change is out of our control. But what we can do is be proactive about how we prepare for it – so we’re ready when it happens.
What’s more, being proactive can also help you be more innovative and responsive to your customers’ needs – opening critical revenue-generating opportunities for you.
In the next blog in this series, I’ll focus on a tactic many of our clients use to optimise their processes and technology. I’ll also look at how they hone their ability to execute test and learn programmes.
According to research by BCG, 70% of digital transformation programmes fall short of their objectives. One reason for this is that organisations often see technology as a ‘silver bullet’ – and end up creating more problems than they set out to solve.
That’s why it’s essential to know exactly what factors should help you drive change. And who better to learn from than some of the UK’s top brands?
We took the opportunity to look at some of our clients’ most successful digital transformation challenges. And we found three key strategies that have helped shape their success over the past year.
#1 – LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS – THEY USUALLY HAVE THE ANSWER
Customer demands are one of the biggest driving forces behind changing industry trends.
Responding to those demands effectively is critical. Failing to meet them can reduce customer satisfaction, and you risk losing customers to competitors who are offering what they want.
At the very least, you might miss out on new revenue opportunities that, if executed correctly, could accelerate your organisation’s growth and brand reputation.
Our relationship with UK hospitality giant Mitchells & Butlers has always centred around meeting changing customer demands. We helped them to introduce innovative new applications to serve their customers better.
For example, we worked closely with the client’s own team to develop an order-at-table app that delivered both real-time item availability and flexibility for their customers at each stage of ordering. It is a simple, straightforward solution putting customers in control.
#2 – TAKE A PROACTIVE APPROACH – BUT BE PREPARED TO REACT
Understanding your customers – and market trends – goes a long way to helping you take a more proactive approach.
For a long time, we have been helping Waitrose & Partners to adapt to more of its business moving online, and to deliver the exceptional experiences its loyal customers expect across a wider range of channels.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, few could have predicted the knock-on effects of a nationwide lockdown on customer habits. When retailers were hit with sudden panic buying, they had to react fast.
For Waitrose & Partners, this meant putting controls in place to ensure its customers could still buy the wide range of products they expect, while also limiting the nationwide impact on supermarket essentials.
Together, we applied product capping techniques to limit bulk buying. By using volume testing to introduce sensible limits on key products, and stopping promotions in line with trading standards law (while starting new ones on uncapped products), the retailer ensured its customers could get what they needed, still safe in the knowledge there were offers to be had.
Once we were confident panic buying was under control, we made changes to stock control systems to help spread the supply of in-demand products across all sites.
Meanwhile, we were also working with the retailer on its Brexit planning contingencies – helping to ensure perishable product disruption is kept to a minimum by adapting sources to within the UK or unaffected countries.
The number of online orders retailers receive is increasing year on year. So, being able to scale as and when you need to is critical. While some peak trading periods – such as Easter, Black Friday, and Christmas – can be plotted on a calendar and are relatively easy to plan for, what happens when the retail landscape changes overnight?
This was the problem faced by Argos when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. While nationwide lockdown restrictions forced its physical stores to close, its online and click-and-collect orders surged to around 90% of its total sales – putting huge pressure on its digital infrastructure.
We’ve been working with Argos for decades, so both teams knew what was required to help the company adapt. Our programme of works took shape in two phases. The first was at store level, where we shifted the focus to optimising stock and picking systems for home delivery and enabling items to be ready for click and collect. This allowed Argos to keep stock disruption to a minimum.
We then worked with the company’s development team to streamline its nationwide distribution network and accelerate system testing – helping Argos to sustainably manage stock around its sites in the long term.
TAKE A CHALLENGE-LED APPROACH TO DIGITAL CHANGE
These examples show how with the right approach – and the right partner – you can unlock new levels of digital change to improve your customer experience and foster further innovation in turn.
By taking a consultative approach that strikes the right balance between making proactive changes and reacting to customer demands, you can make better decisions that will help you maintain a competitive edge.
If you’d like to explore the topic of proactivity a little further, you’re in luck. Read the next blog in the series to discover three ways our clients turned their biggest challenges into their biggest proactive opportunities.
