10 Essential Tools to Support Your Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has been going on for many years. However, many companies fail to effectively use the digital tools at their disposal or take the necessary steps to see results. Being late to the digital game can pose real problems.

The OECD states that digital maturity goes hand in hand with performance. For example, countries that have successfully implemented digital transformation initiatives and continue to innovate, such as the United Kingdom, are three times more efficient and productive than others.

Companies still fear digitalization even though they realize how essential it is for their business. Sometimes it’s because they lack the necessary internal resources or because they don’t consider digital tools a priority expense.

Companies that have gone digital can confirm this. Using high-performing and innovative digital tools have many advantages, including, but not limited to:

• time optimization;
• faster time to market;
• increased return on investment;
• improved internal and external communication;
• information centralization;
• enhanced employee experience;
• customer retention and new sales;

Be the master of your future by improving your digital workplace. To help you take the next step in your transformation, we’ve gathered and evaluated 10 critical digital transformation tools that are available on the market today. Embrace the benefits of these tools and you’ll no longer consider them as an expense. In fact, each digital tool can be a long-term investment that will allow you to stay ahead of your competitors and improve the sustainability of your business.

1. Collaborative Suites

What are the best digital transformation tools? It’s impossible to ignore cloud-based collaborative suites when looking for the right answer here. Today, mobility is crucial for employees who need access to data and resources at all times. To develop and grow your digital workplace, you need to learn how to successfully adapt to using a collaborative suite.

For instance, Google’s G Suite includes a number of well-known digital transformation tools, like Gmail, Docs, Drive, and Calendar. Your employees can share information in real-time and have access to a complete set of tools for improved communication and collaboration at work.

In the Microsoft world, Office 365 provides a collaboration suite that facilitates corporate communication, exchange, information storage, and business activity management. Tools like Word, Excel, Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive are must-have productivity tools for all your employees.

As a fundamental piece and foundation of your digital workplace, a collaborative suite offers significant advantages – it allows you to manage your data, execute critical business functions, organize activities holistically across the organization, and prepare for the new digital era.

2. Communication Tools

Good communication is a prerequisite for the success of any company. Communication – whether successful or not – impacts the productivity and success of your employees and organization on a daily basis.

Unlike email, where information is uneditable, can be misplaced, or distributed incorrectly, digital communication platforms centralize all important information and provide a single source of truth for corporate communications.

With tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, you can create dedicated work groups to ensure that everyone involved in a project or a team is well informed. This not only allows for better circulation of information, but also better involvement of relevant stakeholders in key processes. Everyone in the team can contribute by proposing solutions, giving feedback, or answering questions. Engagement is a fundamental element in stimulating teams and driving them to achieve their goals.

Digital technologies are transforming the way employees work. Employees are no longer constrained by the limits of a physical office. That’s why you need to adapt how you communicate to support your field, remote, and international employees. Other tools like Skype, Zoom, and Google Chat bring communication to the next level with video conferencing and face to face conversations.

3. New Generation Intranet Platforms

Long gone are the days of intranets with static pages and long lists, with no ability to collaborate, customize, or easily make changes. A next-generation intranet platform enables and propels the digital transformation process.

Take LumApps for example. It’s a Social Intranet Platform that facilitates employee collaboration and knowledge sharing while integrating with your collaborative suite and business applications. Here are some of the main functionalities to look for in a modern intranet:

• integrated content management (CMS)
• intelligent global search engine
• natively mobile app
• employee social advocacy tool
• fully customizable design
• multilingual interface
• manageable permissions and governance
• real-time communication functionality

New generation intranet platforms facilitate corporate communication both internally, by building strong team communities for employees to collaborate, and externally, by facilitating external social media sharing. When used effectively, human resources, internal communications, and IT departments have the ability to collect, store, and centralize all corporate information, significantly improve employee engagement, increase daily productivity, and build a strong corporate culture.

LumApps Social Intranet:

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4. CRM Tools

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems can play a significant role in the success of your digital transformation strategy. To stay competitive, you need to be able to keep up with customer’s increasingly high expectations and advanced requirements, which can change from one day to the next. A CRM offers several benefits – it helps companies understand and address the needs of customers, automate tasks, shorten sales cycles, and increase retention – among others.

When evaluating CRM systems, ensure that it can provide the right information and data you need, and that it integrates with other tools in your technology stack. Depending on if you want to deploy on premise or in the cloud, or based on the type of information you want to collect, different systems may work better than others. Take a look into Salesforce, Hubspot, or Freshdesk, which are widely used among sales and marketing teams. Also, when available, take advantage of artificial intelligence and its ability to more quickly provide insights and help you understand your target market.

Based on the data from your CRM, you can develop an effective go-to-market strategy to meet your customers’ expectations. Better yet, you can learn to anticipate expectations to get ahead of competitors, win sales, and prevent customer churn before it happens.

5. CMS Tools

It’s impossible to talk about digital transformation without mentioning CMS (content management system) software. A CMS allows you to create and manage digital content like websites and mobile apps. According to CSO Insights, 70% of buyers fully define their needs on their own before engaging with a sales representative, and 44% identify specific digital solutions before reaching out to a seller. With this in mind, your web content and presentation is critical in your buyer’s decision-making process.

Successful websites are visually attractive, easy to navigate, provide targeted, relevant information, and answer frequently asked questions.

Some of the more well-known systems include WordPress, Prestashop, or Drupal. Each has its own advantages in terms of functionality, ease-of-use, and pricing, compared to tailor-made-sites. If you don’t have a dedicated internal team to create and manage your CMS, it might be worth bringing in an expert agency dedicated to building your ideal website and customer experience.

6. Cloud Storage

Cloud storage solutions are essential for organizations looking for scalability, rapid deployment, and superior information management. With cloud storage, there is no hardware so you can quickly remove or increase capacity on demand. Information is available globally from any system at any time, so you don’t have to be concerned with regional accessibility.

Emerging from the need for a more flexible and mobile workplace, cloud based solutions are transforming the way we work. Frontline workers, retail associates, frequent travelers, and many other types of mobile workers rely heavily on cloud storage solutions to access data without being restrained to a physical office.

Additionally, crisis situations like the most recent worldwide Coronavirus quarantine period, highlighted the importance of digitalization. Many organizations struggled to provide remote access to their employees, as they rely on local, physical storage solutions. With the rise of remote working, cloud storage solutions are indispensable for organizations that want to maintain business activity at all times and from anywhere.

Cloud storage solutions are also proven to deliver high security standards. Data security is of utmost importance to all businesses, especially now that many regulations like the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliances require companies to take extra security measures. Nowadays, cloud storage providers like Google Drive, OneDrive, and DropBox prove that they can deliver the same, if not higher, security standards than internal storage solutions.

7. Project Management Tools

Successful project management means greater efficiency, faster time to market, and beating the competition. It is important to not only choose the right digital project management tool for your organization, but also to ensure the tool is widely adopted.

An effectively utilized project management tool will help your teams create and schedule tasks, stick to project timelines, track progress, increase efficiency and responsiveness, and provide holistic visibility for team members and managers. Ultimately, it will lead to more productive employees, successful projects, and happy customers.

To boost adoption of project management tools, you can set up email alerts or notifications whenever there is a change in project status, a team member completes a task, or help is requested. Sharing documents within the tool allows you to address complicated workflows and tasks with several people in an instant, without having to go through your mailbox or organize lengthy meetings.

An example of some well-known project management solutions include Jira, Trello, Monday, and Asana. Research the various options available and choose the one that fits your needs best. Consider how these particular tools will integrate into your overall digital workplace, considering your collaborative suite, intranet platform, and other tools already in place.

8. Recruitment Management Tools

Recruitment and onboarding have long term effects on corporate culture, performance, and profitability, which is why it’s important you invest wisely in the tools you use to facilitate these processes.

With a digital recruitment tool, you can easily identify and share resumes with team members and hiring managers. You can comment, post interview feedback, and organize next steps in the recruitment process, leading to informed and collective decisions. TalentSoft and SmartRecruiters are among the most relevant recruitment management tools today, that help HR and recruitment teams save time sifting through resumes or interviewing unqualified candidates.

9. Digital Accounting Tools

It’s no surprise that accounting is often considered tedious and time-consuming, but it is also one of the most important parts of any organization for efficiency, security, and accuracy. Investing in your finance and accounting team’s digital tools and enablement can help accelerate processes, mitigate risk, and save money.

Tools like Sage, NetSuite, and SAP ERP are widely adopted, but when you’re evaluating digital accounting tools, look for third party integrations, cloud availability, an intuitive, easy to use UI, as well as reporting and invoicing capabilities.

10. Payroll Management Tools

Last, but certainly not the least on our list, are payroll management systems. Payroll management is another time-consuming action that requires a lot of manual and repetitive work, but it can be done faster, more easily and accurately with the right tool in place.

When transforming a business you need to include tools to automate various HR processes like the payroll and expenses processes. Tools like Payfit, Workday, and Figgo allow you to centralize and manage employee absences, expenses, project hours, career development, and more. Rather than manually monitoring activity and processes, the digital solution will automate the tasks and provide holistic dashboards and analytics. It isn’t just for HR managers in the backend either. Employees can request time off or submit and track expenses directly in the system.

As a result, payroll management tools save HR and employees time filling in spreadsheets and tables, allowing them to focus on higher value, strategic tasks.

LumApps supports your digital transformation by providing a social and collaborative intranet that is tailored to your company needs.