Building a connected business will increase revenue & delight customers

Posted on 4 Jul 2019 by Jonny Williamson

Manufacturers need to move with increased agility and insight to grow and thrive in today’s competitive marketplace. In short, they need to become organisations that can connect everything in order to engage everywhere.

Regardless of your size, sector, market or maturity, becoming a more connected business should be a board-level focus for every manufacturer.

Connected Business - Ove Teigen, Dell Boomi - Manufacturing Innovation Summit 2019At this year’s Manufacturing Innovation Summit, Ove Teigen took to the stage to explain what organisations need to become the connected business and how Dell Boomi helps you become more agile, resilient, competitive and able to deliver superior business outcomes.

“Our digital world requires digital strategies using data assets. No matter what industry you’re in, you are now a technology company. Disruption is all around us, and your ability to react to that disruption is key to your competitiveness,” explained Teigen.

But knowing this is not enough, he continued, you have to be successful in your digital transformation efforts.

However, 74% of digital transformations will fail, according to a global McKinsey study

Why? Application sprawl and business silos

“Businesses that fail in their transformation efforts have one thing in common – they see technology as individual pieces to implement,” noted Teigen. “These businesses are struggling with pervasive application sprawl and disconnected business silos. Maybe that sounds familiar.

The success of any digital transformation effort is dependent on your ability to create a connected business at scale. The common mistake Dell Boomi sees is businesses opting for fast and easy point-to-point solutions,  rather than taking a more strategic, long-term approach.

What organisations need is a connected business that brings together your people, process and technology investments. You need a strategy that helps you:

  • Connect everything – from your best-of-breed cloud apps, on-premise legacy systems, and data stores all the way down to your people and even things. First and foremost, you need a complete fabric of connectivity that spans the globe.
  • Engage everywhere – you must automate your business processes and deliver an engaging experience to your customers, employees or partners through the channels they choose – web, mobile, or any platform.
  • Run anywhere – you need to deploy your applications wherever it makes the most sense to you: public cloud, private cloud, hybrid or on-premises… all the way down to the device.

“A connected business is smarter, faster, more efficient and flexible, one which takes advantage of automated data processing and does it all in a secure way with minimal risk,” Teigen noted.

“Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, you must make technology investments that enable you to adapt your business model at will. Any platform you choose should support your architecture, whether your IT resources are federated, centralized, or decentralised.”

The foundation of the connected business is a unified platform

According to Teigen, Boomi’s unified platform delivers real business outcomes including:

  • A low total cost of ownership that you can only get from a cloud-native solution.
  • Process efficiency, with features like Boomi’s process library and its Boomi community, so you can take best advantage of the best practices from more than 7,000 customers and partners.
  • Fast time-to-value – Boomi has a long history of solving hard problems, and being a cloud-native platform ensures that you are always getting the benefits of that continuous innovation and are always on the latest version.

Manufacturing Innovation Summit - Dell Boomi’s Unified Platform

Teigen concluded by summarising the organisational advantages the Boomi Platform offers:

  • ‘Economies of skill’ – whether an integration project, business process management project, or your data management project, your team will use the same tools and utilise the same skillset.
  • True end-to-end connectivity between technology, processes, and people investments.
  • Ease-of-use that makes delivering business outcomes fast and efficient