Unprecedented changes in the business environment have forced many organisations to dramatically evolve their strategies, products, and service levels to stay competitive and serve the rapidly evolving customer experience expectations.
Edna Eason, MD: operations at Accenture in Africa
It has become apparent that organisations can no longer rely on previous generation enterprise functions and operations with outdated performance benchmarks to support these changes. Prompted by economic, technology and geopolitical factors, more organisations are now compressing their transformation timelines and accelerating their paths to operations maturity.
We call those that are getting this right, the Operations Reinventors. Our research shows that 9% of our surveyed organisations reached the Intelligent level of operations maturity (up from just 7% in 2021), despite a significant shift in performance benchmarks.
These organisations have impressively different results in terms of holistic value creation, such as 1.4x higher operating margins, 2.2x greater shareholder returns, 25% better at providing equal opportunities to employees and 34% better at reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
Five ways to reinvent operations
Organisations seek the fastest path to the most significant value in a highly competitive and constantly changing landscape. When organisations are at peak operations maturity, they outperform the rest. We’re seeing five actions that reinventors take to advance operations maturity and access a new performance frontier.
And the most advanced organisations are driving these actions by leveraging a collaborative ecosystem of partners, as they understand that their own finite internal resources and focus cannot be taken from their core business, customers, competitors and other marketplace actors.
* Seek out 360° value as a North star – Organisations are faced with an increasingly diverse range of value expectations from their stakeholders. To address these, most organisations are re-examining major sustainability issues through a new lens that combines physical sciences and digital technologies. They are looking for ways to engage customers across channels, in person, online and even in the metaverse. Dealing with these diverse priorities requires a fresh approach to accessing talent and realising the full creative potential of their people, all while committing to inclusion, diversity, and sustainability goals. Juggling these demands means keeping the big picture in mind and looking at the value beyond only financial measures–from a 360° perspective.
* Commit to data decisiveness across the enterprise – The supply and demand for data-driven insights among all enterprise stakeholders are increasing, but organisations may be unable to precisely validate, index and organise data to enable these benefits. Operations Reinventors establish a culture that encourages debate around which data to use, where, and how to use it. However, they do so within the guardrails of a clear strategy that governs how data is created, collected, connected, enriched and retained or retired. This strategy helps remove biases and helps them make insight-driven decisions that are predictive yet prudent.
* Innovate processes for enhanced performance gains – Business processes and associated tasks become more complex over time, making process mining more cumbersome. Digital twins are windows of transparency, allowing organisations to shine a light on their internal workings. Operations Reinventors are investing in digital twins and other capabilities for scenario planning, to visualise the as-is process, and discover inefficiencies caused by inefficient activities and process deviations.
* Humanise automation experiences at scale – Organisations are often reluctant to introduce automation in new areas due to resistance from stakeholders, such as business leaders, employees and customers. However, generative AI and other next-gen AI advances provide additional capabilities to drive value. Operations Reinventors make deliberate efforts to explore new use cases for automation with their ecosystem partners, aiming to make automation more user-centric and simplify the relationship between employees and customers with technology. They also measure return on investment and the success of intelligent automation investments differently – instead of only looking at key performance indicators such as faster turnaround times or lower error rates, they are also measuring experience-related outcomes.
* Employ an agile talent strategy – The next wave of business transformation will shift from creating isolated digital capabilities to building a shared reality that converges physical and digital lives. Organisations modernising their legacy systems can find it challenging to align and upskill their teams to make the most of the new technologies. Operations Reinventors make the most of organisational diversity and enable people with a choice of technology to develop solutions to their business challenges. A robust foundation of an integrated and highly automated talent system can fuel flexible future growth, enabling organisations to scale highly specialised talent capabilities without the inefficiencies usually associated with hyper-personalisation.
How to access a new performance frontier
Businesses are racing towards a wildly different future from the one they were designed to operate in. Accelerating operations maturity can help organisations access a new performance frontier. Near 70% of organisations adopting a Total Enterprise Reinvention strategy said in our research that having a business partner that helps select and build solutions and platforms is vital for successfully delivering their strategy.
Such a partner provides them access to flexible capabilities necessary to build a digital core, leveraging process expertise and the deep pool of specialised talent to deliver outcomes at scale.