Our first talk at SCB Business Center on December 19, 2019 (Central Eastville) on the topic of "Digital Transformation for Food and Beverage Industry"
ASAP Project would like to thank you K. Port, the CEO of Corofield (Coro Brothers Co., Ltd.), the Business Mentor of SCB Business Center and SCB for the opportunity to share our thoughts on how to practically and immediately get started with transforming a food and beverage business in the most foundation level such as the everyday "Operation."
We believe the first step is to "Understand" what a digital transformation really is and its levels: 1) Operation 2) Customer Experience and 3) Business Model.
Start with the Operation level and get your basics strong before moving on to the sexier trend like Ai, Machine learning, or robotic automation that have been on the news all over.
To successfully transform your operation, select the areas in the business to focus first, and know the type of tools to manage those areas. For food and bev businesses, the front office will generally need a Point of Sale, while the back office needs a robust ERP. The pairing of the 2 tools are crucial and must be compatible for the integration to succeed smoothly.
Once these 2 solutions are set in place and run efficiently, your operation foundation should be stable and frees you to start thinking about how to transform your business in a Customer Experience of Business Model levels.
Why the need to transform?
Because it is inevitable. Your business will strive for more profit, less loss, more customer/employee satisfaction, and less time consumption.
With people being the most critical and vulnerable factor of the business, it is harder to retain the talents and their knowledge in the company. To prevent such brain-drain, having a rigid system to collect and run the operation instead of manual human work is the shared ultimate goal of most organizations.
So, yes, transformation is inevitable.
How to transform then?
There are a few ways businesses normally resort to in order to carry out the transformation:
1. Business owners, project leaders, and their team dedicate time and efforts to understand, get their hands on and try to do it all by themselves
2. Copy someone else's method and hope it would work for you too
3. Hire a professional or a consultant who understand the need of your business and help turnkey your system.
Most SMEs might resort to Option 1 then Option 2, typically due to the financial concern. However, to save time of both owners and employees, to avoid the risk of wasted investment in the wrong system, and to prevent the loss of trust and confidence of users in the organisation, having a consultant that can directly and accurately suggest the right tool might just be the answer.
Our key takeaways for you:
1. Transformation is never ending; there is always a room to automate.
2. Technology is not going to disrupt your business, but the fast-changing level of expectation from your customers does.
3. Start asking your users about how well the current tool is helping them doing the day-to-day work. If there is a gap, that is the first goal to automate.