Digital strategy is a key successful factor
A business that isn’t digitized will be overcome by the competition
Rumyana Trencheva, Managing Director, SAP Southeast Europe:
Mrs. Trencheva, what impact on business does the rapid development of technology have?
All aspects of our lives are undergoing a change. We ourselves are accelerating the pace of handling information and the knowledge that we acquire from historical data. This helps us to protect ourselves from mistakes, to plan faster and more successfully. However, these scalable and self-enforcing processes can sometimes make many business practices obsolete and are causing the need to change them.
We are already in the era of the digitized economy but what exactly is happening?
The change has already occurred. Every business is digitized and if it isn’t yet – it will surely be very soon, otherwise, it will disappear in its current form. Nowadays, each business process can be automated. In practice, our task is to rethink the current business processes and to develop new ones – powered by the new technological tools, which are already ubiquitous.
How can the traditional industries go through this transition less painfully?
Find your technology partner. Believe in the technology, the platform and the people behind. Companies such as ours provide a lot of knowledge online: from how to develop business process’ model to teaching you how to program it by yourselves or how to create a complete roadmap for the digitization of your business. Start with fast-paced projects related to the customer and partner relationships. This will allow you to quickly gather data and information for your actual market. Choose a ready cloud technology solution that comes with built-in analytics, Machine Learning and AI components. Such projects nowadays can be realized within few months based on your in-house resources.
What is the digital transformation’s “cost”?
We pay for it every day – with the decrease or the increase of our personal information space, by speeding up all processes, and even purely in the aspect of everyday life. In business, the lack of digital strategy may cost us everything that we have built and have achieved.
How is SAP and its products and services facilitating the digitization processes?
We enable our clients to access technology and innovations quicker. Nowadays all our products are cloud-based. And because technology today advance extremely fast, sometimes innovations in every quarter, via the cloud our clients constantly work with the latest upgrades and innovations – both organic and acquired. There is a partner ecosystem in between the software companies and their clients that must integrate and implement the technology solutions. With our technology tools, we reduce both the deployment and the consultants’ training and preparation time.
What’s the future that you strive for?
I strive for a modernized and competitive economy on a local and on a regional level, capable of providing many opportunities for our business to reach larger markets and to impose innovative next-generation products. My greatest satisfaction comes from the projects that help our clients in growing and becoming more profitable.
What do you dislike in this dynamic transformation?
Technology is a great thing when used in an environment associated with a solid moral and socially responsible politicies. If these prerequisites are missing – what is happening today may be self-destructive for some countries and markets in the future.