Four key points for an effective lean digital transformation

The ever-growing demands of customers and of society as a whole have made the incorporation and renewal of products and businesses something imperative and not optional for every organization. Companies that operated in relatively stable sectors need to reinvent themselves. To do so, they are looking to an arsenal of new technologies and digital solutions, which are growing exponentially.

It is a relatively new process for most, which makes it a major learning challenge. Some companies still cannot overcome inertia and innovate at a pace far below what their customers expect. Others speed up the process, but often run into failure for various reasons, such as not knowing the real needs of the market or the ecosystem the company is part of, or high costs, delays, poor quality of what is delivered, etc.

The lean philosophy has always served as a guide for improvement and change in companies, having led countless “turnarounds”. Its principles of focusing on value for the customer, clear purpose, value streams, challenging entrenched paradigms, rapid cycles of learning, etc. remain more relevant than ever and are indispensable for a true lean digital transformation.

Below we highlight four points, inspired by lean principles, that we consider essential for a successful journey:

1) Understand digital transformation as part of the strategy

A digital transformation needs to start with the formulation of a strategic plan. This planning, however, must be guided by clear and well-defined purposes, while always following the lean mindset. In other words, any and every process can only be built or maintained if it concretely adds value for the one who matters, the customer.

Some companies, bewildered by the avalanche of available technologies, thought the question at hand was to “use more and more technology” or to “digitize” their processes, but without a well-defined purpose. And that this would be a task for their IT teams, disconnected from the rest of the company.

It is becoming increasingly clear that digital transformation is first and foremost a business transformation, aimed at driving disruptive changes in people, data and technologies, in order to leverage more challenging results and remain eligible in a highly competitive market without losing time to market.

The intention of bringing in digital solutions should follow from the goals of reducing the time to solve problems, increasing performance, improving quality and reducing costs in the medium/long term. It is a task for multidisciplinary teams, with people from business, marketing, technology, etc.

2) Add value to the customer journey

When we talk about a purpose aimed at adding value, it only exists if it is fully focused on the needs and desires of customers. In the context of digital transformation, understanding what the customer wants and is willing to pay for is not the easiest of tasks.

That is because social and behavioral changes, as well as changes in the digital technology interfaces for this, are increasingly fast and are becoming more “fragmented” across the entire market every day.

Thus, at times, more than understanding what the customer's need will be today, it is necessary to make a projection of what that need will be even before it exists or, why not, to create new needs that we do not yet have today.

In this sense, to deepen the understanding of the entire customer journey, digital transformation should make the most of practices such as design thinking, lean inception and value stream mapping. The latter, by the way, needs to go beyond the “traditional mapping” done from a pipeline view of how value is produced, to also include a customer journey perspective and the behavior of the data flowing through that stream.

Only then is it possible to meet the needs of today and tomorrow with speed and quality.

3) Seek the perfect delivery

In the context of digital transformation, it is not enough just to create good digital products and services. Just as important is delivering them to customers in the best way so that they can understand and use them.

There are many situations in which “digital solutions” seem brilliant when the ideas are conceived. However, when delivered to customers and actually used by them, they turn out to be a resounding failure.

To avoid this, applying the lean concepts of stability, simple and direct processes, quality at the source, monitoring routines through daily management, etc. is important for generating products, processes and services delivered correctly and at the right time – with the assurance that this will be perceived by consumers consistently and with constant improvement.

4) Relearn from the customer experience

One of the most important things about the lean journey is the opportunity to learn from those who actually consume. In other words, it is about truly being able to observe, as closely as possible, how the customer interacts with, handles and consumes what we are delivering to them. And thus to understand as deeply as possible what worked, what is wrong and how to change.

In digital transformation, this is even more important because, in addition to the digital interface generally always being close to the customer, rapid technological and market changes constantly demand new experiences. Thus, it is necessary to understand how to learn from the customer (for example, by combining lean thinking with agile management, from the formulation of the strategy, through product discovery and development, all the way to deliveries).

Although they are not the only ones, these four points, if applied well, will tend to shed a great deal of “light” on digital transformation. They can, for example, help to understand more deeply the real needs of customers – and not those that “I think” exist. Thus, they can help produce more efficient strategic planning, avoiding future wear and losses (for example, the costs of corrective maintenance on poorly planned and executed products or services, resulting from delays).

That is no small thing in this increasingly hypercompetitive market, in which the success or failure of digital transformation is already a matter of survival.