Leading Digital_ Turning Technology into Business Transformation ( PDFDrive )

What Is Digital Mastery? 11
Having built a digital advantage serving India’s billion-person economy,
Asian Paints has expanded to seventeen countries around the world.
None of this would have been possible without successive waves of digital
transformation over the past decade.
According to CIO and head of strategy Manish Choksi, a challenge
of the company has been “to drive efficiency and growth in a business
spread over 120 locations, which deals directly with twenty thousand
to thirty thousand retailers.” 7 After first unifying the company through
strong IT systems for manufacturing, order processing, and supply
chain, the company was on a good foundation for growth. This set the
stage for a series of transformations. Centralizing the routine customer
order-taking process into a single corporate call center increased efficiency
and customer service. The firm’s salespeople then transformed
from clipboard-carrying order takers to always-connected relationship
managers. New automated plants produced higher product quality and
environmental safety than labor-intensive plants did. Expanding into
services—selling painted walls instead of cans of paint—provided benefits
beyond new revenues. Providing the service ensured that high-end
products were applied properly, thereby improving customer satisfaction,
and helped the firm get closer to end consumers that it didn’t typically
meet. 8 As Asian Paints’ website affirms, digital transformation
will continue into the future: “The road ahead is to integrate all our
stakeholders including suppliers, employees and customers and create
an extended enterprise.” 9
Nike and Asian Paints are in very different industries. The companies
have very different products, customers, and histories. But they
have something in common: the way they use digital technologies to
drive their businesses forward. As two examples of Digital Masters,
Nike and Asian Paints are using digital technologies to transform the
way they do business. Digital Masters use technology better than their
competitors do and gain huge benefits. The benefits occur not only in
visible customer interactions, but also in less visible internal Âoperations.
The advantages are apparent in the financials; Digital Masters are
Âsubstantially more profitable than their peers. 10