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DXC Eclipse Addressing the challenges of digital transformation in Australia

Digital transformation in Australia The World Economic Forum describes digital as driving the world’s Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is understandable, as few areas of life have not been touched, or transformed, by fast technological advancements in the last decade. Many services we take for granted today are barely ten years old. For example, it was only 2008 when Apple launched the AppStore, Microsoft announced Windows 7 and the Amazon Kindle was released.

As the pace and sophistication of innovation has accelerated, so have customer expectations. Today’s customers are highly connected and want fast, reliable, rich and seamless experiences across all channels. Traditional businesses are under pressure to transform in order to deliver the experiences customers want, particularly as a fresh breed of nimble, digital-only companies emerges. Digital disruption is a new competitive threat upsetting existing markets and creating new ones.

Australian organisations are whole-heartedly embracing digital initiatives to fundamentally improve how they engage customers, empower employees, optimise operations and transform products.

A 2018 study by Microsoft in partnership with IDC/Asia Pacific estimated digital transformation initiatives will add approximately $45 billion to Australia’s GDP by 2021. The study also found respondents expect “83 per cent of jobs will be transformed in the next three years due to digital transformation”.1

1 https://news.microsoft.com/en-au/features/digital-transformation-to-contribute-45-billion-to-australias-gdp-by-2021/

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78 per cent of organisations surveyed in the 2019 Telsyte ‘Beyond Disruption’ Digital Study confirmed they have a digital strategy in place.2 In the same study, 60 per cent of companies reported they’ve already increased value for customers through a digital transformation strategy. Australia’s Information Technology leaders surveyed for the study cited digital strategy as their organisation’s number one ICT challenge with an emerging focus on customer experience as a top five business priority.3

DXC Eclipse, the Microsoft practice within DXC Technology, recently held a series of workshops across Australia to share insights to the drivers and myths around digital transformation. The workshops also explored the challenges organisations consider to be the most pressing when pursuing digital transformation initiatives.

This whitepaper highlights the core challenges to digital transformation experienced by Australian businesses and shares five stories of companies that have successfully transformed their businesses using Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Factors challenging Australia’s digital transformation

Conversations with current and prospective customers helped DXC Eclipse identify five core challenges commonly faced by Australian companies architecting digital transformation:

1. Improve access to data

2. Enhance customer experience and customer service

3. Optimise operations and controlling costs

4. Add value to people and culture

5. Achieve competitive advantage

2 Telsyte ‘Beyond Disruption’ Digital Study 2019 – page 53 Telsyte ‘Beyond Disruption’ Digital Study 2019 – page 1

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Improve access to data Success in the digital era demands access to real-time, data-driven insights. Real-time, data-driven insights fuel smart business decisions, improve team productivity, deliver competitive advantage, help control costs and enhance employee engagement and customer experience.

A 2018 study of medium to large Australian businesses commissioned by Microsoft revealed that, while the majority know they need to digitally transform their business and feel confident they have a digital transformation strategy, less than a third actually “have a company-wide strategy for sharing data”.4

Hampering the delivery of real-time, data-driven insights are some common challenges. Every organisation at the DXC Eclipse workshops is seeking to build, or refine, a single source of truth about their customer base, suppliers, key stakeholders and/or employees. Many companies struggle with the realities of having multiple data sources in online and offline systems, across legacy databases and new digital sources.

System complexity and multiple “sources of truth” force many organisations to rely on people, instead of systems, for insights. This means data insights are slow to access, offer snapshots in time instead of real-time views and have high error rates from manual human processing.

Business intelligence (BI) tools have been around for years. Yet challenges accessing data sources mean many organisations are slow to deploy visual dashboards based on real-time data flows. Some BI tools have proven difficult to stabilise, maintain and customise in order to share useful insights to multiple stakeholders. Mobile connectivity to dashboard visualisations and predictive modelling capabilities are highly rated needs but not broadly deployed due to limitations around capturing and processing data.

4 https://www.businessinsider.com.au/australian-business-knows-it-needs-a-digital-transformation-heres-the-steps-that-can-make-it-happen-2019-25 https://www.cio.com.au/mediareleases/33967/data-management-challenges-cost-australian/

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The ‘Value of Data’ study conducted by Vanson Bourne for Veritas Technologies revealed data management challenges cost Australian organisations approximately $2.5 million a year.

On average, employees lose up to two hours a day searching for data needed to perform their roles.

Around 30 per cent of Australian organisation manage customer dissatisfaction issues directly related to data management challenges.5

Microsoft Dynamics 365 supports cloud-based data warehousing. This drives real-time views of data, enables integration of different data sources, supports powerful BI visualisations and creates a single source of truth for decision-makers. The Power BI, Cortana Intelligence and Azure Machine Learning modules are natively embedded, giving users access to built-in predictive insights and actionable next steps.

As a cloud-based solution, Microsoft Dynamics 365 includes strong security and access controls for data and apps that are built into cloud services. This covers network connectivity, physical data centres, service hosting platforms, user and administrator access and more.

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“Now that we have a cloud-ready solution that can scale up easily and quickly, we can start exploring some of the opportunities in new ventures. The technology implemented with this project is the backbone of the wider digital transformation of our business. With this solution, we really can do all the other things we aspire to...”

David De Jonge Chief Financial Officer, Pickles Auctions

Case study

Pickles Auctions Pickles Auctions (Pickles) is Australia’s leading auction and valuations specialist, with operations in every State and Territory and a proud heritage spanning 50 years.

As a long-time car auctioneer, Pickles relied on in-person auctioneers. Industry disruption from online car sales meant the business had to expand its services to the web and find new ways to compete. Pickles was able to offer online bidding for in-person auctions but found it difficult to scale beyond that. The company’s ability to innovate was hampered by reliance on legacy systems that had been developed over time but no longer served its needs.

Pickles selected Microsoft Dynamics 365 as the solution to move the business forward. The cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution provides visibility over all operations, a single source of truth for decision making, flexibility and scalability to expand the business in any direction.

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Add value to people and culture

Executives and managers are rapidly realising engaged and empowered employees have significant potential to reduce turnover, improve efficiency and productivity, enhance the customer experience and boost profitability. Studies are emerging that show direct linkages between the levels of an employee’s engagement, productivity and their happiness.6

Research also shows organisations with highly-engaged staff are up to 20 per cent more productive than those with less-engaged staff.7

One of the fastest ways to engage staff is to provide teams with access to easy-to-use tools and real-time data to enable decisions to help them perform their roles.

Organisations seeking to add value to their people and team culture often face several tough realities. At every workshop DXC Eclipse conducted this year in Australia and New Zealand, human resistance to change topped the list.

Sometimes executive stakeholders need convincing that digital transformation is essential for business survival. Sometimes employees need reassurance that “job security through obscurity” is outdated thinking. Often, entire teams need reminding that changes to their current roles don’t necessarily spell bad news for them personally.

The impact of change resistance can reach far. Fear of change discourages some employees from sharing authentic insights to the business processes of today, which are critical to enable new process design for the future. Other employees might be reluctant to place confidence in new systems and processes and will seek work-arounds, thereby slowing user adoption.

Aside from human resistance to change, many organisations struggle to understand current processes and how those processes could be made more efficient. Customer needs are often assessed using guesswork and stereotypes created over time, instead of being grounded in viable data points. Customer lifecycle management is ad-hoc. Employee onboarding, training and self-service programs are inconsistent.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 comes out-of-the-box with an intuitive, easily navigable user interface. This helps ensure ease of adoption and ramps employee time to productivity. Integrating customer relationship management (CRM), Office 365 and additional applications into a single, cloud-based solution drawing on a common data model means employees can quickly and easily access tools, systems and insights to do their job more effectively.

6 https://www.smf.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Social-Market-Foundation-Publication-Briefing-CAGE-4-Are-happy-workers-more-productive-281015.pdf#page=9

7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2017/12/13/promoting-employee-happiness-benefits-everyone/#36fcf4d5581a

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“We are excited about providing the business with critical information around cash flow, business processes, targets, all from a single system. Microsoft Dynamics 365 delivers all of this functionality out-of-the-box and that’s going to be a significant change for the business. For a global business like ours, a cloud-based software that transcends borders enables our staff to access one single source of truth, so they are no longer working in silos or reliant on manual processes.”

Pravin Singh CIO, tna solutions

Case study

tna solutions tna solutions is a leading global supplier of integrated food processing and packaging solutions. The organisation has 500 staff working across 14,000 systems installed in more than 120 countries. Process and system complexity across a distributed global team posed significant operational difficulties. With so many employees distributed across so many countries and systems, it was difficult to ensure every person had access to the best information they needed in the moment in which they needed it.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 provided tna solutions with an integrated cloud-based solution to give its global workforce a single platform with secure, anytime access to information. The results? A powerful improvement in tna solution’s team efficiency, collaboration and real-time decision making.

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Achieve competitive advantage

Globalisation and technology advancements have introduced significant pressure to Australian markets. Gaining competitive advantage on the basis of cost alone is no longer viable, with competitors from other geographies able to offer lower labour costs and greater efficiencies in scale. To compete globally, Australian organisations need innovation, insights and agility. They must adapt their business models with digital strategies to achieve four critical outcomes:

1. Improving efficiency and containing costs by removing manual processes and adding automated workflows.

2. Using real-time, 360 degree data-based insights to customer buying behaviours to create engaging journeys that nurture a customer through the entire lifecycle.

3. Speeding time-to-market with new, or improved, products and services to help retain existing customers and attract new ones.

4. Creating a memorable, positive, seamless experience that brings customers back again and again.

The most material challenges for organisations realising competitive advantage lie in being able to make good decisions with speed and in creating a holistic view of their customers. Too often, data distributed across multiple systems clouds the view of the customer. Strategic channel partners aren’t able to be easily connected with the business. Employees work in silos to bridge the gaps, often using slow, manual processes. Even when teams are keen to test and learn they can’t always access the budgets to do so as it means diverting funding from a mission-critical current business process.

Moving to the cloud is the first step for organisations looking to become more competitively agile. Freeing up the business from costly IT infrastructure delivers flexibility, agility, scalability and releases budget to pursue insights, innovation, efficiency and an improved customer experience. Competitive advantage follows.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is anhe enterprise cloud-enabled software-as-a-service suite combines ERP, CRM with additional features including Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Flow and Microsoft PowerApps to give businesses, large and small, the ability to securely grow, evolve and adjust to the needs of their dynamic business environment.

Q. How important is it for your organisation to leapfrog competitors’ (or peers’) digital strategies?

5%Not important

41%Somewhat important

54%Important

Source: Telsyte Australian Digital Workplace Study 2019, n=447, base: opinions based on an eleven-point scale from 0 to 10, 0 to 3 being not important, 4 to 6 being neutral and 7+ being important

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“With Dynamics 365 we can map great technology to outstanding business processes that will help us continue to expand our markets and adopt new business models. Everyone benefits from that. The company benefits, the customer benefits – its win-win for all.”

Matt Keays Chief Information Officer Michael Hill

Case study

Michael Hill Founded in 1979, Michael Hill is a global retailer in the mid-market jewellery sector. The company has pursued significant growth over the last ten years. By 2017, Michael Hill operated 350 stores across four countries.

Ahead of the rapid growth curve, the team could see the strategic plans of the business demanded many more omni-channel processes than existed at the time. As they pursued expansion, the team needed to remain agile and differentiated from the competition and provide fast service to meet customer expectations.

Michael Hill chose to adopt Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Retail, Finance, Operations and Customer Service to help the company bring its data all together in a single platform, enable its employees to have a complete view of the business and facilitate a stellar customer experience.

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Optimise operations and control costs Each year, global economic and political dynamics create fresh uncertainty for Australian businesses. To mitigate uncertainty and maintain a competitive edge, many businesses seek to better control costs.

Optimising operations lets organisations save money and time, both of which can be reinvested in the business to fuel expansion. More efficient operations also free up employee time to focus on innovation, pursuing growth opportunities and improving customer service.

Telsyte research shows that, on average, most Australian organisations spend around half their IT budget on operations, with the balance on innovation and transformation initiatives. The same study revealed that operational cost savings rated second in a list of top five business priorities for 2019.

Organisations are often hindered from proactively optimising operations and controlling costs by lack of real-time insight into where current expenses are incurred. Financial reporting is available for periods of time, rather than moments of time. This constrains the ability to prioritise projects, re-allocate spend or understand where true costs are incurred.

Increasingly, organisations are seeking scope to reduce costs and support sustainability. Every organisation is mindful of the balance to strike between scaling up services and operations without always being able to scale up staff. Misconceptions around costs of technology needed to evolve a business can also delay a productive conversation around transformation.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 moves an organisation’s core business systems to the cloud. Cloud-hosted applications offer cost savings through subscription-based licensing models, reducing the requirement for expensive on-premise hardware and eliminating the need for costly upgrades because the platform automatically updates in the cloud. With Microsoft Dynamics 365, businesses no longer need to leap into a large-scale implementation. Instead, organisations have the flexibility to implement the specific modules in the cloud that make sense to their business.

Q. What are your organisation’s top business priorities for 2019?

Source: Telsyte Australian Digital Workplace Study 2019, n=447, base: all respondents [rank]

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Revenue growth

Improving business agility

Improving digital customer experience

Operational cost savings

Improving integration of digital initiatives

1 2 43 5



“Currently the monthly reporting cycle sits at around 10 to 12 business days. We plan to cut that down to five days using Business Central. This will deliver additional business efficiency alongside improved access to data for staff.”

Jeff Bennett Chief Financial Officer PS+C Group

Case study

PS+C Group Founded in 2013, PS+C Group (PS+C) is a leading end-to-end ICT and digital consulting organisation with over 400 expert consultants and locations across Australia. PS+C was made up of twelve business units, each running as a separate entity with its own individual accounting, payroll, and timesheet systems. Consolidation and reporting was delivered via Excel spreadsheets. To grow, the group needed a fully integrated system that brought finance, payroll and timesheets together.

PS+C chose Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central to solve these challenges. Business Central had all the capabilities the business required, even beyond what other pure accounting software offered, and came with the security features, trustworthiness and reliability reputation of Microsoft products.

Today, the system provides better access to information for PS+C staff members, letting them react faster to changing conditions. It also improves cash flow management and accuracy and speed of invoicing.

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Enhance customer experience and customer service The quality of customer experience and service is fast emerging a significant competitive differentiator for brands. The digital era has catapulted customer experience far beyond the moment of purchase. Today, customer experience begins in the moment a consumer decides to make a purchase. For brands, optimising the customer experience means making every step of the journey to purchase as easy, clear and fast as possible.

Statistics proliferate around the importance of customer experience and customer service. Gartner predicts that by 2020, customers will manage 85 per cent of their relationship with a business without interacting with a human .

Research by Forrester found that experience-led businesses have 1.6x higher brand awareness, 1.5x higher employee satisfaction, 1.9x higher average order value, 1.7x higher customer retention, 1.9x return on spend, and 1.6x higher customer satisfaction rates .

The biggest challenges faced by organisations in streamlining customer experience and service processes lie in data gaps. Data gaps mean organisations don’t have the insight to understand buying behaviour or the range of customer touchpoints with their brand. Many organisations don’t know when a customer is approaching them, when a customer leaves them and, most critically, why. This lack of insight makes it difficult to create content to engage customers, nurture them closer to sale or understand the experiences that matter most to their customers.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement comprises sales, customer service, field service, and marketing capabilities to provide a robust and effective platform for improving customer experiences. Overlaying interactive dashboards and 360-degree customer data visualisations from Microsoft Power BI gives employees instant insight to customer behaviour.

This real-time view lets employees track, update and personalise the customer journey, allowing them to proactively and meaningfully respond. Blending ERP, CRM, Office and additional apps into one, cloud-based experience on a common data source gives employees the information they need to provide quick, reliable customer support.

8 http://cloudtransformation.cio.com/article/the-customer-centric-business-great-expectations/9 https://www.cmo.com/features/articles/2018/4/26/forrester-consulting-it-pays-to-be-an-experience-led-business.html#gs.c72vi6

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“This project is one of the most significant projects Beyond Bank has done in 10 years. This has been truly transformational and a real game-changer for the organisation.”

Robert Aitken former Chief Information Officer, Beyond Bank

Case study

Beyond Bank Beyond Bank is one of Australia’s largest customer-owned banks with assets under management over $4 billion, 200,000 customers, 43 branches, access to more than 3,000 rediATMs and 600 staff. Beyond Bank uses many different industry databases and industry-specific approaches.

This created a complex network of software applications that slowed the bank’s processes and made it almost impossible to deliver a consistently outstanding level of service. Beyond Bank’s ability to capitalise on potential sales opportunities and deliver a unique, personalised experience was hindered by its disparate systems, which stored essential information in various silos.

Beyond Bank selected a complete cloud-based Microsoft implementation, including Dynamics CRM, Office 365 and Microsoft SharePoint; leveraging the entire Microsoft stack to deliver a seamless, efficient and effective user experience. The solution gave the Bank a complete view of the customer accessible from any location, a range of sophisticated reporting abilities and substantially lower cost of ownership.

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“The new solution lets Beyond Bank users view customer history, accounts, correspondence and portfolio information. The combination of tightly integrated applications makes it possible for Beyond Bank to gain the 360-degree customer view it needs, and to act quickly on insights to improve business performance.”

Conclusion Achieving digital transformation can help organisations dramatically improve their operations and their ability to compete successfully. A true digital transformation goes beyond simply choosing and implementing new technology. It’s essential to take a strategic approach to transformation so that, rather than adding digital elements to existing processes, companies can truly transform their systems, processes and people to yield extraordinary benefits.

Successful transformation requires the right mix of a technology vendor and partner. The technology vendor needs to offer fit-for-purpose, configurable solutions. The partner needs to understand the strategic imperatives driving the organisation’s transformation and have the capability to create a roadmap to achieve those goals.

DXC Eclipse is proud to have implemented the first Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Retail customer globally in the cloud in 2016. Since then, it has helped many other organisations across a range of industries to fast-track their business transformation to better engage customers, empower employees, optimise operations and evolve products.

Together, Microsoft and DXC Eclipse provide the ideal partnership to deliver real-life solutions to transform organisations and set them on a path to success.

“…All the knowledge and insights you need exist inside your infrastructure—in your emails, your documents, your line of business applications—it’s just waiting to be found using organisational analytics and provide insights into what is going on.”

Satya Nadella CEO, Microsoft

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About DXC TechnologyAs the world’s leading independent, end-to-end IT services company, DXC Technology (NYSE: DXC) leads digital transformations for clients by modernising and integrating their mainstream IT, and by deploying digital solutions at scale to produce better business outcomes. The company’s technology independence, global talent, and extensive partner network enable 6,000 private and public-sector clients in 70 countries to thrive on change. DXC is a recognized leader in corporate responsibility. For more information, visit www.dxc.technology and explore thrive.dxc.technology, DXC’s digital destination for changemakers and innovators.

© 2019 DXC Technology Company. All rights reserved. DG_2184a-20. June 2019

DXC Eclipse DXC Eclipse, a practice within DXC Technology, helps enterprise and mid-market companies accelerate digital transformation, solve business challenges and deliver intelligent solutions for clients, employees and partners.

Partnering with Microsoft, DXC Eclipse has a proven track record of helping organisations successfully transform their business. Whether the transformation requires migration, new implementations or upgrades, DXC Eclipse has the team to provide the best possible results.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides fit-for-purpose, configurable solutions that help accelerate access to real-time data-driven insights. DXC Eclipse provides the expertise to guide an organisation through designing strategic objectives for transformation, and transparent project roadmaps to achieve those objectives.

For more information around how DXC Eclipse and Microsoft Dynamics 365 could transform your business, visit www.dxc.technology/au/eclipse.

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