Digital transformation to help cut costs in corporate sector

Business Wednesday 10/May/2017 17:45 PM
By: Times News Service
Digital transformation to help cut costs in corporate sector

Muscat: Digital transformation can enable companies to convert ideas into value faster than their competition and cut down costs, experts from Intertec Oman said at a conference.
Integration of digital technologies into all areas of business activities, processes and models of a company is the basis of digital transformation and companies in the Sultanate have actively begun to consider such technologies. However, experts believe officials must work more aggressively towards achieving it to reap more benefits out of such technologies.
“Companies that have undergone digital transformation have seen up to 26 per cent higher profits than their peers within few years of implementation. It just shows how important it is for fast tracking all processes in companies to digital,” Nikhil Kothari, director of Intertec Oman, said while narrating anecdotes on ways Intertec helped clients double their revenue and halve IT costs.
“Automating mundane processes that have historically been pushed through manually is the need of the hour with so many companies and governments trying to cut costs and push for efficiency. Digital transformation can drive these cost reductions and help explore areas that would be impossible in a manual process.”
Shifting to automated systems with least amount of human intervention is preferred for systems that perform routine procedures while also increasing customer experience, reducing operational and capital expenditures and lowering service to effort ratio.
According to reports, most of the top industry firms in the world will be disrupted due to a digital transformation in the next five years and it is a matter of ‘transform or perish’ for these firms. Omani firms, including government organisations, such as Information Technology Authority and the Royal Oman Police have undertaken major efforts in recent years to integrate all processes into their IT infrastructure.
“Earlier, digital transformation used to be about saving money, manage efficiency and act as an enabler, but now it has changed. It is about making money, creating efficiency and being a business partner,” another speaker from Intertec said.
“Businesses need to look at changes in data centres and end user experience through this. We need to look at storage virtualisation to enable more storage and reduce costs of racking up storage spaces in data centres, so instead of 10 racks we can have two or three instead. Similarly, businesses also need to serve consumers through giving them one platform to access all information needed,” he added.
The official proposed a single dashboard service catalogue, which users can use, to get any required data.
The digital transformation market is expected to be valued at $1.3 trillion.