Across industries, digital transformation went from being a buzzword to becoming a top priority for organizations as they use it to maintain a competitive edge. Digital transformation can help your team improve operational efficiency and deliver better customer experiences. In this article, we'll explore how to use no-code tools to plan and implement your digital transformation.

What is digital transformation?

Digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to create new or improved business processes, products, and services. When done right, it can help organizations achieve operational efficiencies, improve customer experiences, and drive innovation and growth.

However, digital transformation is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. What works for one organization may not work for another and what works for one industry may not apply to another one. As such, it’s important to tailor your digital transformation strategy to fit your organization’s specific needs and goals.

There are many different areas to approach digital transformation. Here are a few of the most common:

• Automation
• Analytics
• Cloud computing
• Customer experience
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Mobile apps
• Security

In other words, digital transformation is bringing technology into your business to help make everything run better and faster. 

How to use digital transformation to improve operational efficiency

By automating and digitizing manual processes, you can improve communication and collaboration across your organization. Additionally, by leveraging data and analytics, you can optimize your business processes and better evaluate areas of strength and weakness. Here are a few tips on how you can use digital transformation to improve operational efficiency within your business:

1. Automate manual processes: One of the easiest ways to improve operational efficiency is to automate manual processes. This can include tasks such as data entry, expense reporting, and scheduling. By automating these processes, you can free up time for your employees to focus on more productive tasks. Additionally, automated processes tend to be more accurate and efficient than manual ones.

2. Implement data-driven decision making: Another way to use digital transformation to improve operational efficiency is to implement data-driven decision making. For example, you can use data to identify bottlenecks in your process or areas where your employees are struggling or not meeting industry benchmarks. Then, you can put in place measures to address these issues and track the progress to see if the new measures are making a difference.

3. Improve communication and collaboration: Sometimes, enabling different teams to simply have access to information in an organization is all it takes to improve productivity. This means letting people receive and update data easily while maintaining data integrity and security.

How to identify areas to improve operational efficiency

Improving operational efficiency leads to increased profits, a more competitive edge, and improved customer satisfaction. How do you identify where to improve?

1. Ask your team. Whether its managers or on-the-field operators, ask them what they feel like could be improved with automation or digitization. 
2. Identify bottlenecks in your business processes or areas with frequent problems. If a process is taking too long or causing errors, it may be a good candidate for improvement.
3. Review existing data and metrics related to your business operations and see how they perform compared to prior time periods, competitors, or industry benchmarks.
4. Look at processes that have not been updated or evaluated in a long time. Processes that worked well 3 years ago may no longer make sense for the stage or size of the business today.
5. Identify the most frequently used processes. Improving the high volume or high frequency systems you have in place can make a greater impact on your business than processes that are rarely used.
6. Identify areas that employees or customers have shared dissatisfaction. Keeping employees and customers’ happiness up can impact overall moral and performance for the company.
7. Ask people outside your organization for ideas and feedback on where they’ve focused on improving.

Once you have identified areas for improvement, there are a variety of ways to tackle the problem. One approach is to streamline processes by automating tasks or introducing new technology. Another approach is to change the way work is done by redesigning processes or changing organizational structure. A third strategy is through culture and people - ensuring you have the right values, norms, and talent in place to achieve your business goals.

No-code tools for your digital transformation needs

No-code tools like Blaze are an excellent approach to your digital transformation of several reasons:

1. Keeping costs down. No-code tools are tools that allow users to create and customize software applications without writing any code. This can be a huge time-saver for businesses, as it eliminates the need to hire expensive developers or learn coding yourself.
2. Speed to launch. Build full web applications and tools from scratch from beginning to launch in hours. 
3. Augment the power and visibility of your existing data. No-code tools allow you to bring in data from your existing CRM, database, and other third-party apps and give more people in your organization access to that data without compromising security or data integrity.
4. Improve communication. From customer portals, onboarding, and message centers, build tools that let your team and customers communicate with each other more effectively.

No-code tools we like:

1. Blaze: Build internal tools and web applications without writing code. Bring in your data from Google Sheets, your database, and Airtable and build custom tools.

2. Webflow: This powerful platform lets you build websites without writing any code.

3. Airtable: A spreadsheet tool that can be used for managing projects.

Ready to add no-code to your digital transformation journey? Sign up for free with Blaze.