Digital transformation is here to stay

Digital transformation is here to stay. It has been dismissed by some as a buzzword, a fad, but at TSG we know it’s essential to getting ahead of your competition, improving customer experience and ultimately increasing profitability.

The use of technology to transform is a concept that can intimidate some, particularly small businesses, but it’s not about spending as much money as you can on the fanciest bit of software you’ve ever seen. Digital transformation starts small, and grows as your business does.

For many businesses, Office 365 represents the first step on their digital transformation journey. By moving email into the cloud, return on investment (ROI) is immediately realised in the reduced need for server and storage space. It also solves the headache of bloated inboxes and poor performance.

More businesses than ever are now on Office 365, but many businesses aren’t using it to its full potential. Many businesses upgrade to get the latest versions of the classic productivity suite of Word, Excel and so on. But with packages offering a wealth of applications at no extra cost, you could realise a huge ROI when using it effectively.

One business that has transformed the way it works using Office 365 is Young Scot, Scotland’s national charity that supports young people aged 11-26 by providing support and information. As a charity, it doesn’t have an enterprise-level budget to blow on digital transformation. But thanks to the subscription-based model of Office 365, all of its innovative applications are accessible no matter your budget.

Young Scot was already operating on Sage 200, and were looking to tackle challenges the business was facing, as well as improve business KPIs. Thanks to its integration with Office 365, and TSG’s unique expertise with both Sage 200c and Office 365, the charity decided to upgrade to Sage 200c. An added benefit here was the move to the new innovative ERP solution rather than a straightforward upgrade. You can find out more about Sage 200c’s digital transformation capabilities at our FREE event at The Shard on 21st February – find out more and sign up now.

Through implementing Office 365 tools such as Teams, Planner and OneDrive, the business has significantly improved the way it communicates and works.

Another customer TSG has helped on its journey towards digital transformation with Office 365 is Historic Property Restoration. The North East-based business repairs and conserves ancient monuments, buildings, castles and parks across England and Scotland. Due to the nature of its work, Historic Property Restoration has a large team of field-based workers.

Thanks to Office 365 and the work of TSG’s fantastic experts, the business moved away from a time-consuming, clumsy paper-based system for site visits to an intelligent, mobile solution that utilised PowerApps and SharePoint. Historic Property Restoration was already using SharePoint, but by moving to Office 365 and SharePoint Online, the company was able to completely overhaul, and drastically improve, the way it managed its field workers’ jobs.

By creating a SharePoint Online list with a PowerApp attached to it, this could be used as an electronic job sheet for field-based workers that could be updated real-time. Managers could use the PowerApp to assign tasks to field workers based on their location, whilst those workers could access their jobs on their mobile devices, and update critical details including progress and time spent.

This solution not only saved time and removed an outdated, physical process, it has also allowed Historic Property to speed up its invoicing process.

Thanks to the shift towards subscription-based pricing and the now-accessible, enterprise-level functionality within Office 365, two of our customers have seen significant strides made in their digital transformation journeys. Solutions like this show that baby steps can still have a significant impact and it can take only one or two immediately-deployed applications to revolutionise an entire business process (or two!)

What’s next?