3 ways businesses can fast-track future readiness with intelligent operations

MANILA, Philippines — In this time of unprecedented change brought about by the pandemic, organizations’ digital foundations and capabilities have been tested to drive business continuity. Beyond finding cost efficiency, the role of business operations has now shifted to driving growth and creating value.

Today, there is a need for new, agile ways of doing things if companies and industries are to succeed.

Business leaders who find the "sweet spot" across technology, talent and data with intelligent operations, will be able to transform organizations as well as raise their profitability, productivity, efficiency and quality of customer experiences. Collectively, this augurs well for the future of work and talent, especially for industries such as the IT-BPM industry in the Philippines.

In our latest research titled “Fast Track to Future-Ready Performance,” we found that even with the pandemic, a small group of companies (7%) still achieved about three times the profitability and twice the efficiency of peers.

These "future-ready” companies are already rethinking how work is done across technology, people and processes, which is the backbone of intelligent operations. By using the latest technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, and data analytics, they are able to create new ways to fill orders, serve customers or develop products. The research estimated that if the remaining 93% of companies practiced these same strategies, it would add $5.4 trillion in global profitability.

Transforming how a company operates brings tremendous benefit to the enterprise as cited by research respondents in areas such as speed of innovating products; engaging and retaining employees; customer experience; and employee talent mix and reskilling efforts.

In retail, for example, using intelligent operations enabled by SynOps platform to forecast inventory demand, Accenture is helping a grocery chain allocate inventory to stores more accurately, forecasting demand up to eight weeks in advance with machine learning models. Outcomes included a 33% productivity increase, a 15% boost in forecasting accuracy and a 30% inventory reduction.

A way forward

Critical to becoming future-ready businesses is the talent and people who constantly create value using the latest technologies, rich data for decision making and agile workforce models supported by machine intelligence. The key focus areas for these future-ready companies are in: cloud, smarter data, machine intelligence, agile workforce and ecosystems relationships. 

The report enumerates three actions that companies can do to accelerate their future-readiness:

1. Know the ultimate goal

Start with the end goal in mind and go beyond incremental change. Among future-ready organizations in Accenture’s report, 82% expect to scale leading practices across their enterprise within the next three years.

Within the context of the IT-BPM industry in the Philippines, it has recalibrated its growth goals for 2022 and outlined imperatives to continue to contribute to economic recovery post-pandemic by addressing opportunities brought about by the accelerated digital transformation of companies.

In order to do this, the industry has recommitted to talent upskilling and reskilling as a significant factor in accelerating digital transformation.

Globally, Accenture has invested nearly $900 million for the training and development of our people in new technologies such as automation, agile development and intelligent platforms. This helps our people pivot to capabilities towards more complex and value-adding work that goes to the heart of our client’s business challenges.

2. Know the key steps

The three crucial steps are: automate at scale, augment human talent with technology, and commit to data-driven decision-making with better and more diverse data.

Accelerating operational maturity is much easier now, thanks to the cloud, data and analytics. According to Accenture’s report, future-ready organizations are highly mature (90.4%) in using cloud at scale and more than 78% are already planning to explore new areas for scaling cloud and maximizing value in the next three years.

To address this demand, Accenture announced in 2020 a $3 billion investment over three years through Accenture Cloud First to help clients across all industries rapidly become “cloud-first” businesses.

Accenture also noted the importance of human+machine collaboration where technology helps free up people from transactional work allowing them to focus on tasks that require creativity and critical thinking. Thus, organizations are able to realize work efficiencies and identify new sources of value.

For Accenture in the Philippines, this means diverse future-ready work opportunities that will constantly challenge and allow the workforce to innovate impactful solutions for complex business problems.

3. Know how to leapfrog maturity levels

Establishing ecosystem relationships, boosted by complementary skill sets and on-demand technologies, is one way to fast-track operational maturity.

Intelligent operations allow companies to unlock transformational value quickly with solutions like SynOps, which brings together solutions, pre-build assets, extensive ecosystem partnerships, and process and industry expertise.

The time is now for companies to fast track their future readiness by investing in intelligent operations to outsmart, outperform and outpace the competition. And, along the way, businesses can elevate decisions to realize tangible, sustainable and transformational value and growth. 

About the author: Benedict Hernandez is the client experience lead for Asia Pacific, Africa and Middle East of Accenture Operations.