Achieving business excellence through process improvement & digital transformation

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, leaders across industries and organizational scales face increasing pressure from both internal and external forces. These forces drive them to rethink how they maintain and enhance their company’s competitive edge while meeting the diverse needs of their customer base.

Staying ahead in this complex environment often requires not only innovation but also a proactive approach to strategic change, as business leaders aim to deliver sustainable value amidst a sea of rising expectations.

As technology capabilities accelerate, so does the frequency of questions it raises. Emerging technologies offer unprecedented opportunities, yet few reach the highest levels of adoption within organizations, often due to gaps in alignment with existing processes. The decision to integrate advanced technology must be carefully weighed, considering how it will enhance, disrupt or support the company’s strategic goals.

The pursuit of business excellence

A common thread uniting leaders across sectors is the pursuit of business excellence. At its core, this ambition drives a search for new opportunities while continually optimizing existing operations. However, within this context lies a broader challenge: Understanding the evolving lexicon of business transformation and its relevance to the organization’s long-term objectives.

As leaders undertake the assessment of their strategic portfolios and prioritize investments, they may find themselves immersed in a maze of methodologies, frameworks and definitions. Questions often arise: How do digital transformation and business transformation differ or intersect? Where does hyperautomation fit and how does it relate to intelligent automation (IA)? What role does process excellence play in achieving these goals and how can leaders accelerate outcomes? Further, they must consider the kind of organizational structure required to support these transformations and weigh the costs and returns of their investments.

In an environment characterized by complexity and rapid change, clear definitions and strategic clarity are essential. Only by answering these fundamental questions can leaders ensure that their transformation efforts deliver real, measurable impact – positioning their organizations to not only adapt but thrive in the face of future challenges.

Lisa Williams, global operations talent strategy and employee experience director, manufacturing and engineering operations at Dow, discusses embracing new technology

How continuous improvement & digital transformation serve process excellence

It is common to perceive continuous improvement and digital transformation as distinct functions, often aligned with separate business units due to their different focuses. However, both ultimately serve process intelligence and are complementary, forming a unified journey toward organizational excellence.

While continuous improvement examines the nature of business processes, their performance and opportunities for optimization through task and responsibility adjustments among employees, digital transformation identifies and implements optimal digital solutions to facilitate these improvements.

Nao Anthony, senior manager in operational excellence at Commonwealth Bank and Tariq Munir, APAC financial planning transformation lead at PepsiCo, outline the complexities and challenges of digital transformation

Often digital transformation becomes part of continuous improvement initiatives if a digital solution was selected as deliverable. Both functional areas complement each other and thus are very successful when performed simultaneously as one solo journey. There are plenty of benefits when both strategies are executed simultaneously. These include:

• A balanced approach that combines the stability of gradual improvements with the dynamism of digital innovation.
• Organizational responsiveness to change – better user adaptability, user inclusion and greater user satisfaction scores. Happier business groups increase the success of change
• Data-driven decision making as continuous improvement very much relies on quality of data and digital transformation provides advanced data pooling and data gathering opportunities.

In the below diagram, we illustrate how both funcstions relate to business excellence.

The potential of simultaneously running initiatives

Simultaneously running initiatives have high potential for success. Continuous improvement initiatives always trigger operational change (both through tasks adjustments or through integrating digital product) and thus these efforts benefit well in sharing company resources, budget allocations and data insights.

Incremental technology adoption as continuous improvement is focused on small scope integrations and experiments which later are followed up by scaling. Through eliminating waste and inefficiencies, the cost saving potential is enormous. When continuous improvement and digital transformation are paired, processes become faster with reduced manual work and bigger overall productivity.

What’s more, digital product development fulfils the IT elements of continuous improvement initiatives and so becomes inevitable. Each of the running initiatives may become part of another more complexed business process, while the integration phase is almost always at the same time which allows to keep good oversight of the initiatives.

All Access: Process Mining and Process Intelligence 2025

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