Situation
Our Client, a leading player in the process manufacturing industry, was facing challenges in fostering its B2B interactions through digital technologies. These challenges arise mainly from the intrinsic nature of its business: time-consuming pre-sales activities, high product customization, intense competition, market fragmentation, and key role played by distributors worldwide.
Open Web Technology was approached to clarify the Client's digital strategic vision, propose an actionable roadmap of initiatives and align the organization for digital readiness.
Approach
In order to reach these goals, the team at Open Web Technology applied a four step methodology:
1. Analyze the Client's current digital ecosystem
During an initial phase, we conducted more than 50 interviews with clients and internal stakeholders to map our Client's B2B interactions to a client-centric value chain designed by the Open Web Technology team.
This framework allowed us to gather pain-points in B2B interactions and ideas of improvements through digital tools, as well as identify and assess the current digital initiatives and tools.
2. Define the ambition and expectations aligned to the B2B space
The client-centric value chain, together with a digital benchmark of B2B competitors and other industries, helped us define the Client's digital ambition.
3. Define an actionable roadmap of prioritized initiatives to reach the objectives
This digital vision was the key aspect in a series of workshops to educate, scope the opportunity and prioritize ideas. The outcome was an actionable three-year roadmap of 17 digital projects, 5 of them being highlighted as top priority projects.
4. Propose a digital governance model
Finally, our team recommended a governance model to support those projects, given the specificity of digital initiatives versus IT projects.
By providing an external perspective, Open Web Technology was able to crystallize the role of digital technologies as enablers of our Client's B2B strategy. Key messages were spread across the organization to initiate a digital transformation. The digital roadmap, composed of catch-up and innovative projects aiming at clients and distributors, obtained key stakeholders' buy-in.
Open Web Technology was mandated to expand the scope of this strategy to Asia, leading a deep-dive analysis into the Chinese market.
