Digital transformation - the integration of digital technology and competencies in all areas of the business - is like the shifting of tectonic plates: varying in pace, irreversibly changing the landscape, and inevitable. It not only impacts how value is delivered - it necessitates a fundamental cultural change in how companies see themselves. While COVID-19 accelerated this process, the seismic wave had already started long before that and many businesses had already recognized the need to respond to the newly emerging reality.
However, adoption rates of digital technologies differ across sectors. For example, the differences between sectors with and without physical products are distinct. Companies in healthcare, pharma, and financial services tend to move faster in their digital transformation journey than those in consumer packaged goods and automotive & assembly.
Let’s narrow our lens further and explore some specific cases. At Prime, we have partnered with many businesses at various stages of their digital transformation. We will look at three of our partners who embarked on their DX journeys even before the pandemic, each operating in a different sector: banking & financial services, healthcare, and supply chain.
Digital Transformation in Banking and Financial services
For a few years now, banks have been facing a climbing trend in client preference toward managing everyday banking digitally rather than in an office branch. In fact, Kearney predicts 25% of Europe’s bank offices would be closed by 2023, as digital experiences become customers’ first choice. With the rise of fintech disruptors, in 2018 Gartner predicted that if traditional financial services firms do not embrace digital transformation, only 20% of them will remain relevant by 2030, with the other 80% imminently going out of business.
Mashreqbank PSC – the oldest and one of the largest privately-owned banks in the United Arab Emirates – recognized these consumer and market shifts early on.
In 2019, before COVID-19 entered the scene, Mashreq had already started an initiative to completely transform all their customer-facing channel applications, including their Customer Mobile Banking Application, Customer Desktop Banking Application, Credit Cards Marketing Application, KYC Application, and Branch Service Tablet Application.
To complete their digital transformation efforts in the desired time frame, they needed the assistance of several providers, including Prime Holding. We were responsible for the development of the backend infrastructure, which is now used by all channels, as well as for the development of the first MVP (tablet branch application), used by the bank's customers in the physical branches.
To help Mashreq complete the digital transformation initiative in the desired timeframe, we:
- Delivered a fully-featured MVP tablet application
- Developed a complete set of backend services around the main domain object that was initially backing up the tablet application
- Achieved greater scalability
- Improved the development process by implementing CI/CD pipelines
Digital Transformation in Healthcare
Telemedicine - the use of telecommunications and technology to provide health care from a distance - is not, strictly speaking, a pioneering invention. It was introduced half a century ago, in the 1970s, but its inception dates back to the 19th century. Put simply, when medical professionals are at a physical distance, they have been relying on available technology - from analog to digital - to diagnose and treat their patients.
With the introduction of the Internet and more advanced digital technology, telemedicine has become more sophisticated, reliable, and - in some cases - preferred by both healthcare professionals and their patients. This trend was recognized and embraced by a number of companies operating in the healthcare sector, long before COVID-19 pressured 93% of healthcare organizations to seek digital innovation. A 2019 study concluded that adoption of telehealth among physicians jumped 340% between 2015 and 2018, with 22% of professionals using video visits to consult their patients at the end of 2018.
One of our partners, a Swiss-based healthcare provider, saw an issue with in-person visits. Namely, the daily schedule was usually fractured by fluctuations: some visits ran over their assigned time window, while other visits lasted a shorter time and resulted in large gaps.
The reason for this was simple: the daily structure of the agenda was determined solely by how the patients happened to book it.
Our partner needed a solution for online doctor appointment booking that would serve all 4 of their clinics in the country and while providing the user with full control over the booking parameters, it would also ensure a time-efficient and convenient process for both the clients and the healthcare providers.
Our team developed an appointment booking system that employs AI in order to structure an effective booking process. The tool was developed as a supporting tool for the internal CRM system of the client and is available for both patients and staff. Its main advantage, the active scheduling algorithm, facilitates the booking by distributing appointments evenly throughout the week based on previous statistics and assigning appointments that fit perfectly into the agenda structure. As a result, there are no more gaps and no more daily fluctuations.
Digital Transformation in Supply Chain
The majority of supply chain organizations recognize that digital transformation is a key priority but over half of them struggle with building a roadmap that attends to both short-term and long-term objectives. While the process is challenging and - for this sector - comparatively slow, the companies that have already adopted digital technologies have seen marked growth, optimized costs, and reduced risks.
For example, we at Prime delivered such results together with our partner Bulsafil – a Bulgarian manufacturing company that had been running their operations on a custom warehouse management system for 17 years.
The WMS had been altered by multiple different developers over the years, leading to several database inconsistencies and overloads of the Bulsafil servers. Moreover, Bulsafil needed additional functionalities such as producing operational and accounting reports as well as tracking the history of inventory revision changes.
We decided to develop a REST API-based WMS from scratch with a responsive web application. The product covers all identified manufacturing processes and roles. The articles, suppliers, and orders from the legacy system have been migrated to the new one, enabling all-time access to their historical records.
Now, Bulsafil’s warehouse management system is a fully equipped web application to serve in managing the articles (supplies, fixed assets, spare parts) per supplier, tracking purchase and repair orders, annual inventory revisions, collection of supply and their distribution to the manufacturing machinery. All operations can be tracked in the wide reports specter and integrated with a barcode scan to prevent manual entry errors.
In this way, we managed to introduce optimizations to the workflows of the different roles and scaled various WMS features, making work at Bulsafil seamless and efficient.
Digital Transformation with Prime Holding
The goal of digital transformation is to revolutionize the way your company does business while also future-proofing it against constantly changing internal factors, external competitors, industry trends, and new technologies. So, we believe that at the heart of digital transformation is the ability of organizations to align their business processes with their most valuable information assets.
We, at Prime, deliver digital transformation advisory using a best practice methodology, firmly rooted in design thinking principles. This is used to tackle digital transformation challenges in creative yet rigorous ways and help businesses to identify the sweet spot for innovation.
Do you need more information about building your digital transformation approach?
Check out our full Digital Transformation Executive Guide or book a consultation with our team of experts to define your ambitions, design your approach and deliver your strategy efficiently, with the right team on your side.
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