INTERVIEW OF THE MONTH
INTERVIEW WITH Mr. Vijay Samuel,
VP Operations, Annalect (Omnicom Media Group)
In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, staying ahead of the curve is essential. Could you highlight some specific strategies you’ve implemented to ensure your operations remain agile and adaptive in the face of technological disruptions?
To stay ahead of the curve amidst technological disruption, businesses must remain agile and adaptable. With the pace of technological change accelerating, it is crucial for businesses to be flexible and open to change to avoid becoming irrelevant. This requires a willingness to experiment with new ideas and technologies and the ability to pivot strategies when necessary. By remaining agile and adaptable, businesses can stay ahead of the competition and thrive in the face of technological disruption. To stay competitive and relevant, businesses must navigate disruptions and stay ahead of the curve. Open to sharing few strategies that businesses can adopt to achieve this goal.
- Keep up with the Latest Technological Trends – The first step is to stay informed about the latest trends and developments in technology. This involves investing time and resources into researching and learning about emerging technologies and their potential impact on your industry. Keeping up with technological trends requires a mindset of continuous learning and adaptability. You can attend conferences, seminars, and workshops that are related to your industry, subscribe to industry-specific newsletters, and follow thought leaders and influencers on social media platforms. By staying up to date with the latest technological trends, businesses can identify new opportunities and potential threats. This can help them make more informed decisions about where to invest their resources and which technologies to adopt.
- Build a Culture of Innovation and Foster a Culture of Continuous Learning – To stay ahead of the curve, businesses need to create a culture of innovation, continuous learning and adaptability. This means encouraging and rewarding creativity, experimentation, and risk-taking. When employees feel empowered to share their ideas and try out new things, they are more likely to come up with innovative solutions that can help the company stay competitive. To build a culture of innovation, businesses can establish regular brainstorming sessions, provide resources and support for employees to experiment with new ideas, and recognize and reward employees who come up with innovative solutions. Innovation can come from anywhere in the organization, not just from the top. By fostering a culture of innovation, businesses can tap into the creativity and expertise of their entire workforce. Encourage employees to keep up with the latest trends and technologies, and provide them with opportunities to learn and upskill. Businesses can offer training programs, workshops, and mentorship opportunities to help employees stay up to date with the latest developments in their industry. Additionally, businesses should encourage employees to share their ideas and insights with each other, creating a collaborative and innovative work environment. By fostering a culture of continuous learning, businesses can ensure that their employees are equipped with the skills and knowledge necessary to navigate technological disruption.
- Embrace Automation and Focus on customer experience – Automation is transforming the way businesses operate. They can help companies streamline their processes, reduce costs, and increase efficiency. To stay ahead of the curve, businesses need to embrace automation and AI and use them to their advantage. For example, businesses can use AI-powered tools to automate routine tasks, such as data entry, scheduling, and customer service. This can free up employees to focus on more complex tasks that require human intervention. In today’s digital age, customer experience is more important than ever before. Customers have high expectations when it comes to the quality of products and services they receive, and businesses that fail to meet those expectations risk losing customers to competitors. By focusing on customer experience, businesses can build customer loyalty and increase customer lifetime value. This can help them stay ahead of the competition and grow their business over the long term.
How do you prioritize and decide which aspects of operations should undergo digital transformation? What criteria or strategies guide your decision-making process?
For a successful Digital Transformation, Identifying the goals of the digital transformation is key such as is the company primarily trying to upgrade systems? Incorporate new technology? Adapt processes to a new organizational structure? What has caused the need? The first step is to understand the reasons for the transformation. This could be due to the need to upgrade systems, incorporate new technology, adapt to a new organizational structure, or other reasons. It is important to have a clear understanding of the objectives of the transformation in order to ensure that the right changes are made.
Collaboration across departments is crucial for successful digital transformation. Can you provide an instance where cross-functional cooperation played a pivotal role in driving operational efficiency and customer satisfaction through technology adoption?
Cross functional collaboration is the glue that holds together the focus on customer experience, the process based view and the effective use of enabling technology in facilitating business transformation. Successful business transformation is based on an outside-in view. It has the potential to challenge the current business model and create value through an end-to-end process perspective and enabling technology. It drives major change at the enterprise level in order to create more value for customers and shareholders alike. Successfully executing business transformation is best accomplished through collaboration and an integrated approach to process and technology such that it becomes easier for employees to delight customers.
Data-driven decision-making is a hallmark of modern operations. How has data analytics and insights from digital tools empowered you to make informed choices that have had a positive impact on both operational processes and overall business outcomes?
Making decisions is an integral part of managing any organization, whether by executives making planning decisions or employees on the frontline, deciding how you engage with customers, partners, and vendors. The most successful organizations today are increasingly turning to data-driven decision making to inform decisions at every level as the most effective means of leveraging resources and identifying new opportunities. Data driven decision making relies on analyzing collected data using different data collection methods to answer questions and find insights that can inform judgements, help determine the right course of action, and guide overall strategy. This approach remains one of the top trends in analytics because it helps to improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness by enabling companies to understand what happened in their organization, why it happened, and how specific decisions might shape future business outcomes. Data-driven decision making can provide businesses with numerous benefits, including increased accuracy and reliability, more objective decision making, improved efficiency, and competitive advantage. Companies seeing the most benefit from data-driven decision making have experienced this level of impact by empowering every kind of employee with the ability to ask and answer their own questions to inform their specific decisions. Companies embracing data-driven decision making at all levels are already seeing massive improvements, with companies identified as leaders having grown revenue 10-30% in the same period that their competitors’ growth has remained flat. In a survey, more than 80% of leaders say that empowering every employee to make data-driven decisions will increase productivity, customer satisfaction, and product and service quality. Every company can do the same, and see improvements across their organization.
Looking ahead, what emerging digital trends do you believe will have the most significant impact on operations?
Digital Transformation – adopting new-age technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, IoT, Blockchain, etc. Data Analytics & Predictive Analytics – The production process creates a large amount of data. Using analytical tools, operation managers interpret this data and make informed decisions. Supply Chain Optimization, Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 – Industrial IoT enables real-time monitoring of assets. It predicts the need for maintenance and improves visibility across the supply chain.
