Digital transformation is expected to affect, if not disrupt, all functions of the organization. Every line of business stands at the threshold of tapping value from advances in technologies. It is often enticing to get tangled in the technology and confuse the means with the ends. But it is paramount that the organization remains focused on the business goals rather than the tools and technologies needed to achieve them. We have to pick our top business problems or opportunities and look at the possibility of leap-frogging on them using exponential technologies. There are tremendous possibilities of adjacencies to our current business model to generate new revenue streams. Broadly, we can think about creating ExpoTENtial impact (10X impact with exponential technologies) on the following four pillars:

10X Awareness
A digitally transformed organization is hyper-aware, predictive and agile. Speed and scale are crucial; the more real-time and granular we get, the more responsive and competitive we can be. Technologies are available to access, decipher and comprehend data to understand information patterns and generate actionable insights. Big data is no longer a Silicon Valley term, it will be a part of our daily work sooner than we expect. We can now enable faster and better decisions based on known and unknown trends; by drawing insights from internal and external data.

At Dr. Reddy’s, we are seeing desk research go beyond the usual google search, using crawling techniques through patents, scientific literature, and internal documents to find information specific to our interest. We are doing a pilot to crawl data on incidents and investigation report to find hidden insights and correlations. We are also looking at improving robustness of our manufacturing processes thorough machine learning and multivariate analysis between process and quality parameters.

10X Efficiency
Any process that can be taught to a self-learning BOT, can be theoretically made infinite times more efficient. We are only limited by the computing power that we can put behind the BOT. Repetitive tasks and subjective decisions are now being automated with cognitive technologies and NLP. We expect to witness dramatic shifts in speed, accuracy, cost and customer delight with robotic process automation in various areas includingGBS, Dossier filing document checks and others.

10X Engagement
Digital technologies have transformed customer engagement towards deep personalization. Leveraging different channels of communication like social platforms, online conferences, chat bots, Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality, we are catapulting customer interaction. Eventually being able to capture all points of ‘Phygital’ interaction (physical and digital), we should be able to create a 360 degree view of our customers. This would enable personalization at n=1, i.e. personalization at the level on an individual customer! The other application of engagement is with our employees. The ‘Digital Workplace’ aims to simplify the life of every employee, by using chat bot as personal assistant, creating structure to our work by enabling a task-based approach to everything we do, easy search for data, documents and colleagues and faster collaboration for problem solving.

10X Re-imagination
Michael Porter says that strategic advantage is about doing things differently, not simply doing them better than everyone else. This is how Netflix disrupted the entertainment industry by streaming high quality content and personalized recommendations backed by artificial intelligence. Several organizational processes have evolved over a period of time, and while they fit our needs, have given rise to complexity. Change Control is a great example - an audit finding leads to a CAPA that adds a step to Change Control across the organization. Parivartan, a safety initiative, led to adding a safety team approval to all Change Controls. While initiated with good intentions, each one of these individual decisions led to a complex process. What if a Digital New-Born firm were to design these processes from scratch? What would they retain? What would they eliminate? What would they give to a BOT? We will have to reimagine, redesign and rebuild our critical business processes like a digital-born company. We have used the ‘Digital Lean’ methodology (a combination of Lean technologies, DesignThinking and Digital Technologies) to reimagine Change Control and SOP creation. These success stories open up possibilities to apply this to many more of our critical processes.