Zeki Demirtaşoğlu, President of the Association of Milling Machines Manufacturers (DESMÜD), made statements on "digital" technologies releted to the sector.
President Demirtaşoğlu emphasized that in a competitive market economy, the increasing interest of milling machines manufacturers in digital offers them the key to sustaining their business more reliably and with acceptable profitability, but with that the right approach to "digital" and, then, listed his views on the subject.
It has been talked about the buzzword "digital transformation" for many years, initially used to describe the adoption of digital technology to digitize non-digital products. Post-pandemic, this approach to digital transformation has now become a past thing in the business world. Any international business that has not undergone this kind of digital transformation in the last three years is either now a niche or - more likely - no longer in the business any more. Whether it is a website, or a mobile app or a social media platform, almost every business today has to have some kind of online presence. Therefore, the term "digital transformation" is an outdated term that no longer applies, and instead, we need to move forward with a mindset that embraces "digital evolution".
Digital evolution is the continuous adoption and improvement of new and emerging technologies to increase business efficiency, reduce costs, outpace competitors, and achieve better results. Success in business is put at risk when the current pace of change cannot keep up with this new state of affairs, where new technologies and services are being developed and launched at lightning speed, providing better information, increasing automation and pushing boundaries further.
Harvard Business Review estimates that of the $1.3 trillion spent annually on digital transformation before the pandemic, $900 billion was wasted. Entering full crisis mode with the pandemic, companies have increased their spending to revolutionize their digital approach, enrich their online presence and survive, but many are now in serious trouble as they have failed to create a solid long-term strategy.
During the Covid crisis, many retailers who had invested in their own website but fulfilled orders manually were forced to enter e-commerce without finding enough time, resources or capacity to fully understand, evaluate and implement the end-to-end digital process. The digital evolution will improve efficiency and profitability by adequately understanding this process and enabling the gradual development of the right operations. It is inherently more cost-effective to increase efficiency by implementing a program to improve what is already in place, rather than scrapping what is already there and starting over today. This approach often makes much better use of employee time and capacity and frees employees to focus on the next stage of innovation, which is important in these times of inflation when capital owners are scrambling to "protect their assets".
A recent report by multinational enterprise software company Sage found that 83% of HR leaders and 85% of business leaders are expected to focus increasingly on the employee experience. It is clear that for any digital evolution program to be successful, relevant stakeholders, including core HR teams, need to be engaged and change plans need to be supported by appropriate learning & development opportunities. Underpinning this is the need for HR professionals to gradually adapt to technologies such as people analytics, cloud HR and employee self-service. This is not a one-off effort, but a gradual and continuous development process. At this point, it is important to recognize that for any digital evolution program to be successful, relevant stakeholders, including your own HR team, need to be engaged and change plans need to be supported by a robust communication and engagement plan.
I would like to conclude by emphasizing once again that I believe that digital evolution will also have beneficial results for our DESMÜD member companies and that the efforts and actions of our members in this regard will contribute to their success.
