Digitization and climate change are both hot topics. The two subjects are also getting used together in the same sentence more frequently. For example, did you know digitization is good for reducing carbon emissions? According to the World Economic Forum, Digital technologies have the potential to reduce global emissions by 15%.
Since the pandemic lockdown, people have been working from home. The workforce has been slow in returning to the corporate office setting. An IFS survey conducted last year reports that almost three-quarters of respondents plan to increase spending on digital transformation. The climate control benefits include a reduction of CO2 emissions due to less commuting and travel to in-person meetings. Technologies like Microsoft Teams have made multi-site team meetings easy and readily available.
Cloud migration is the price of admission to competing in the digital world.
Moving your IT environment to the cloud reduces the need for additional hardware, but more importantly, to your bottom line and the environment, cloud migration modernizes your operations. While being on the cloud, and using robust cloud-enabled services like IronOrbit’s INFINITY Workspaces, won’t make your business carbon neutral, it is a significant first step on that journey.
DEMATERIALIZATION
How You Can Reduce the Environmental Impact on Doing Business
Hardware casings, cords, adaptors, and other electrical products are called E-waste. E-waste is a growing problem. Significant environmental damage happens because nature cannot absorb these products. E-Waste is a significant contributor to the haphazard disposal of old electronics: they’re inert. All E-Waste products contain hazardous materials of one kind or another. The toxic materials are predominantly lead and mercury.
By switching to IronOrbit’s cloud, you can reduce the amount of hardware because you no longer need to invest in so many on-site computer stations. There’s no need to pay for its maintenance or replace machinery when it becomes obsolete. Instead, you only pay for the exact services you need. Over time, this saves you money. Cloud computing can help your company become sustainable while making it more profitable and productive.
Reducing Needless Travel Reduces Carbon Emissions
INFINITY Workspaces is our brand of DaaS, robust technology that enables employees to work remotely with ease. There are different INFINITY packages to fit specific use cases. Even designers and engineers can access the most demanding modern applications on their mobile devices. INFINITY Workspaces empowers Geographically dispersed teams to do their best work. The technology inspires productivity while eliminating the need for lengthy commutes. It also eliminates the carbon emissions associated with daily commutes.
Adopting a work-from-home environment or even a hybrid workplace is an excellent way to reduce your business’s carbon footprint. You could also save some money in the process.
Shared Data Centers Reduce Greenhouse Gases (GHGs)
On-premises servers and data centers use substantial amounts of energy both for running and cooling. The manufacturing, packaging, and shipping of the hardware and peripheral products also add to GHG emissions. Companies can reduce emissions considerably by moving to a cloud computing environment. Once a company moves to the cloud, they use shared data centers. Like the ones operated by IronOrbit, shared data centers run far more efficiently than individual facilities or on-premises servers. There is no longer a need for personal equipment.
A recent forecast by the International Data Corporation (IDC) reports that cloud computing will prevent the emission of more than one billion metric tons of CO2 between 2021 and 2024. Moving away from legacy software and hardware and towards cloud adoption is a logical next step for companies. Insofar as business continuity and investment in the future, cloud migration is a necessity.
Cloud computing and all the digital benefits of having your IT infrastructure on the cloud are valuable for IT departments. IT departments can work more closely with business leaders to develop new sustainability goals. It is favorable for companies, and of course, it contributes to a healthier environment.
Contact us for a no-obligation proof of concept. We’re here to help.
At a recent design and manufacturing conference, a question came up. “Is the industry ready to make use of new technologies?” The answer came back, a resounding no. Most companies have skipped the step of digitizing their existing processes, so they’re not ready for new digital inputs. Perhaps an excellent intermediary step would be to reimagine business as usual by partnering with a managed service provider (MSP).
Shifting to a managed services environment is a critical step for many businesses. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with wondering about your next best business decision, then you’re not alone.
Many companies haven’t figured out how to change themselves enough to grapple with legacy challenges, let alone how to solve new, more complex puzzles like digitizing operations. By having an MSP like IronOrbit, companies can take their time becoming more comfortable with the idea of digitizing. When companies are ready to digitize, they won’t need to do major surgery on their IT infrastructure or data architecture before they begin. Instead, they’ll have a reliable partner who can focus on providing the right technology at the right time.
The Growing Skills Gap
In January 2021, a McKinsey study found that 87% of companies worldwideare aware of a skills gap. Gaps in IT departments will become increasingly conspicuous as emerging technologies continue to get a foothold. In the digital age, companies need to move fast. Ongoing IT education is prohibitive for many organizations. Even if the financial resources are available, the process is too slow. There is a genuine need for businesses to move faster than before. Whatever they can do to enable their operations to be more transformative and innovative with their use of technology, the better off they’ll be for whatever happens next.
As soon as an IT, enterprise resource planning (ERP), or e-commerce business solution is down; an organization instantly loses profits. Efficiency and expertise are necessary for getting these solutions back up and running. Bracing for the storm of increasing demand and decreasing labor power, business leaders may feel stuck when making their next move. If this is the case, managed services could be a solution. Here are the factors to consider.
Bridge the Skills Gap
A recent Prudential survey reports that businesses that focus on continuously expanding employee skills have a tremendous advantage over those companies that don’t. When critical business technology goes down, companies can’t wait for internal IT teams to figure it out. Having a managed services partner like IronOrbit can efficiently solve the issue; moreover, a predictive analysis might prevent such disruptions in the first place.
Your Perfect IT Partner: Five Things
When considering a managed services partner to fit your business, there are five key characteristics to consider:
Cost Savings – With IronOrbit’s managed services expertise and ability to efficiently solve IT challenges, you’ll notice significant cost savings by filling the skills gap and preventing extended downtime, lag issues, and recurring IT problems.
An Increase in Productivity & Efficiency– Supporting your business and employees is IronOrbit’s reason for being. IronOrbit’s Managed Services free your internal IT, so they can focus on other priorities and increase your business’s efficiency.
Quick Response Times – IronOrbit’s support staff is available when you need them so you can increase efficiency. IOCentral’s self-help automation tools make it fast and easy to open support tickets and check status around the clock, three hundred and twenty-five days a year. IronOrbit guarantees a consistent and reliable communication line to address urgent issues efficiently. Access to IronOrbit Resources and Specialized Expertise. IronOrbit service providers are certified professionals who have the expertise your business needs.
An Extension of Your IT Department – With IronOrbit’s Managed Services, you’re not just getting a solid and secure IT infrastructure; you’re getting a partner who can liaise between your IT department and your ERP and e-commerce providers for the most effective solutions. Your team will have more time to spend on furthering business-critical activities than solving IT problems.
Finding What Works for Your Business – IronOrbit has the expertise and innovative technology to best support you and your team regardless of the business needs. IronOrbit’s Smart Managed Services enables you and your teams to step away from any IT needs to focus on critical strategies for sustainable business growth. You’ll have more bandwidth to experiment and figure things out. Plus, you’ll have a technology partner ready to provide options for any challenge that may appear on the horizon. Companies face innumerable disruptive threats and risks. IronOrbit’s Smart Managed Services ensure smooth sailing for your IT environment now and in the future. We’ll be there whenever you’re ready to do more of anything, including digitize operations.
Please call us now at 888-753-5060 for a free no-obligation consultation.
Digital Manufacturing Can Be a Game Changer for the Industry
Manufacturing is the lifeblood of American industry and was once the envy of the world. No other industry can mobilize the nation like manufacturing. America’s response to World War II was the most extraordinary mobilization of an idle economy in the history of civilization. During the war, 17 million civilian jobs were created, there was a nationwide productivity increase of nearly one hundred percent. Corporate earnings more than doubled.
Today, the manufacturing industry is a pale remnant of what it was before inflation and companies moving manufacturing offshore to places like China. But American manufacturing is at a crossroads. US Manufacturing could continue its downward spiral or turn things around in a big way. For American manufacturing to reclaim its international glory of years past, it must embrace the willingness to learn, innovate, and adopt new technologies. Collectively, these technologies are a part of digital manufacturing.
Defining Digital Manufacturing
Digital manufacturing is the application of cloud computing systems to manufacturing services, supply chains, products, data collection, warehousing, and processes. Digital manufacturing technologies link systems and processes across the production environment to create an integrated approach to manufacturing. This strategy encompasses everything from design and development to production and servicing the final products. Traditional factories were analog environments where everything was built by hand, have become Smart Factories.
Think of how the basic 1970’s cellphones evolved into the 90’s smartphones—taking a phone that only made phone calls to a mobile computer that can browse the Internet and run software applications. Then in 2007, the hyper-connected iPhone burst onto the scene. From the beginning, the iPhone was like a Swiss Army knife. It included everything you could want to do with a computer-driven gadget. The iPhone is now a professional quality camera and many other things.
Similarly, a Smart Factory is hyper-connected, predictive, and does many things old analog factories can’t do. These next-generation facilities are the core of digital manufacturing. A fully functioning next-generation manufacturing facility is built on cloud computing to optimize operations, store, and process tremendous amounts of data. The rest of the intelligent factory digital platform utilizes AI, big data analytics, automation, and an array of sensors.
Industry 4.0
In 2017, an article in The Economist stated that “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.” Today, data’s expanding amount and role are the driving force in Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum first identified as “the Fourth Industrial Revolution” or Industry 4.0. Manufacturers can break down siloed workflows and blend employees’ digital and physical worlds by utilizing technologies ranging from IoT (Internet of Things) to M2M (Machine to Machine) communications. Digital technology can dramatically improve productivity in planning and streamline production processes. It could also help solve another growing problem.
According to a study by Deloitte last year, as many as 2.1 million manufacturing jobs will be vacant through 2030. The report warns that the worker shortage will hurt revenue and production. Positions left unfulfilled could ultimately cost the US economy one trillion dollars by the end of the decade. Skilled labor hasn’t been the only hurdle. Supply chain disruptions and difficulties sourcing raw materials hobble the industry. Digital manufacturing can help fill industry jobs by attracting talent who want to use new technology. These people want real-world experience on digital tech designed to increase efficiencies because they know how valuable that experience will be long-term.
On August 12, 2021, Forbes article, Willem Sundblad writes that even if manufacturers can find what they need, prices are so high that they threaten margins. High inflation is sure to exacerbate the supply chain problem.
The battle cry from leaders in manufacturing is to seek out
suppliers geographically closer to production centers
more resilient supply chains
technology that can help modernize processes
skilled talent to operate effectively in a next-generation factory setting
Sundblad reminds us that the US is good at innovating but not so good at scaling those innovations compared to other countries. While the manufacturing industry might averse to risk, the American spirit is all about taking a calculated risk, especially when our backs are up against the wall. The window of opportunity is open, but it won’t remain open indefinitely. Remember, things move fast, and the stakes couldn’t be higher for manufacturing to get innovation right. Writing about transforming businesses through technology and innovation, Ethan Karp is the President and CEO of a non-profit manufacturing consulting group called Magnet. In his Forbes article, 4 Reasons 2022 Can Be A Game Changer for American Manufacturing, Karp recognizes the opportunity for American manufacturing.
If American manufacturers can invest in talent, technology, and innovation, they’ll be in a good position to take advantage of available opportunities. Karp identifies five of them. They are:
Take Back the Supply Chain
Use a combination of technology and innovation. Think about the incredible pivots thousands of manufacturers made during the pandemic to meet the demand for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).
Take Calculated Risk
Karp urges manufacturers to override being conservative and take calculated risks. He suggests ways to mitigate the risk of innovation by asking four questions:
Are you solving a real problem?
2. Does your product solve the problem?
3. Can you deliver this solution?
4. Can you sell it?
Invest in the Smart Factory of the Future
Take whatever capital is available and invest in the technologies used in a Smart Factory. These technologies are the most direct way for manufacturers to excel in a competitive and dynamic marketplace. Over time, Smart Factories lower costs by speeding up processes, reducing downtime, and minimizing waste. These digital innovations will improve supply chain efficiencies.
Automate to Offset Talent Shortages
Karp emphasizes the importance of automation by sharing the story of Gojo, the company that invented the hand sanitizer Purell. The family ran operation successfully tripled its production almost overnight to meet pandemic demand. The company was ready because of its investments in Industry 4.0 technology over the years. Gojo has automation to do repetitive tasks and frees employees to do more value-added technology work, like programming and running the machines. The company hired 500 new people in 2020.
Capture the Infrastructure Boost
Manufacturers like steel and transportation suppliers will be kept busy with the government-sponsored trillion-dollar investments in transportation and public safety. Karp offers two recommendations:
Evaluate margins to provide a buffer against the unknown
Have the technology and talent already in place to manage production surges.
As accurate as the threat of digital disruption is, future success is more about making informed decisions with a view of the long-term consequences. Leadership is about establishing a direction and vision for the future, aligning people around that vision, and motivating and inspiring them to take action. Making better choices is a necessary ingredient.
In the February 2022 Harvard Business Review article, How Incumbents Survive and Thrive, Julian Birkinshaw looks at how Fortune 500 companies remain stable despite disrupters. “When companies face a disrupter, their natural response is to fight fire with fire: to set up a competing digital unit, build an incubator or accelerator, or pursue a transformation.” He cites a McKinsey study that found “companies that adopt bold, offensive strategies in the face of industry digitization improve their odds of coming out winners.”
Companies must embrace digital technology to improve operational effectiveness. The global utility Enel has a division that experiments with new business models (demand management and electric vehicle charging). The unit is called Enel X and has enormous growth potential. However, it currently represents less than two percent of the parent company’s revenues. Everyone else at Enel focuses on optimizing the existing business and providing its nearly seventy-two million customers with high-quality service. But the new technology in its factories and distribution networks, including reengineering its infrastructure and processes, that went into Enel X has bolstered operations throughout the organization. For technology to help manufacturers succeed, leadership should take the time and energy to develop an adaptation strategy that best fits their organization’s unique needs and capabilities.
Considering how Digital Manufacturing and the Smart Factory of Industry 4.0 can help you streamline workflow, be better positioned to seize opportunities, and maintain margins. Don’t start out by going for the big objective. Start with low-hanging fruit. Even still, before beginning any digital manufacturing initiative, understand the technology. Learn what technologies perform what types of tasks and the strengths and weaknesses of each. If you have a chief technical officer or IT director, get them involved in discussions as soon as possible. Suppose people in the IT department have a good understanding of the different Smart Factory technologies. In that case, they’ll save the company wasted time and money pursuing the wrong technology. They’ll also help prevent making technology choices that don’t fit the company objectives. Again, the real tipping point is the willingness to learn.
If you don’t have information technology or data science capabilities on staff, build a team of external service providers. Having the right pool of resources is essential.
The Key Areas of Digital Manufacturing
Cost Reduction
Utilizing cutting-edge technologies to optimize processes can result in financial efficiencies within a manufacturing operation.
Enhanced Customer Experience
Customer-facing technologies help give the customer transparency into the manufacture of their product and ease of communication and collaboration with the manufacturer.
Provisioning of Resources for Employees
A modern workplace nurtures better employee satisfaction and retention rates. The next generation of employees has grown up with high-impact technologies. They expect the deployment of quality effective technologies within their working environments.
Innovation
Traditional manufacturing and production methods are undergoing digital transformation. Going beyond production automation, the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) found in Industry 4.0 blurs the boundaries between the physical world and the virtual in cyber-physical production systems (CPPSs). A report from Deloitte describes CPPSs as online networks of social machines organized like social networks. They link IT with mechanical and electronic components that communicate through a network. Smart machines continually share current stock levels, problems, and changes in orders or demand levels.
Improved Operational Efficiency
Although last on our list, operational efficiency is the biggest “selling feature” of the move toward Digital Manufacturing strategies. By digitizing operations, data can be collected, categorized, and analyzed at every stage – from raw materials to finished and delivered products. The utilization of this data then allows your manufacturing firm to use agile cycles to grow and scale.
Digital Manufacturing Isn’t Just for Global Giants
Most manufacturers across the country have engaged in a digitization effort. That digitization allows their CIOs to develop digital transformation strategies to help their manufacturing operations inch closer and closer to Industry 4.0 ideals.
In Conclusion:
Digital Manufacturing is a genuine game-changer for the industry. To say there are many benefits to digital manufacturing is an understatement. The hyperconnected Smart Factory merges complex manufacturing processes across different departments. Smart Factories eliminate the paper-based process and automate data exchange in fractions of a second. Communication and collaboration going in all directions simultaneously far extend the reach of any manufacturer. What is more, digital manufacturing inspires people to learn and innovate on a much higher level.
Every manufacturer is at a different stage of their Digital Manufacturing journey. The decision to convert traditional factories to smart facilities requires deep engagement with the entire company. Set priorities and create a portfolio of projects. But keep this in mind; the benefits are well within the grasp of even small to mid-size operations. Remember the story of Gojo and how they routinely invested in modernizing their operations. Not all at once but over time. When the time came, regular investments in technology made all the difference. Using smart and autonomous technologies, CIOs are blending the physical and digital worlds while making the most of human resources along the way.
How can organizations unlock the full potential of IT to accelerate?
Can you scale while keeping all the plates spinning? Your current employee base may be doing an excellent job of keeping all their plates from crashing to the floor with the current technology in use, but adding many more employees and ramping up operations with that same technology stack results in pieces and shards of plates smashed all over the floor.
Business scalability is all about efficiency and growth. To be genuinely scalable in the modern sense of the word, an organization must:
accommodate increased demand
stay on top of trends
anticipate needs
be agile enough to handle disruption
The punch line is that all this has to be accomplished quickly. The need for speed requires companies to be highly efficient. That’s where the advantages of cloud environments come into play.
Scaling within the cloud helps you avoid the crash-resume-crash-resume cycle that companies are faced with when trying to scale with an on-site IT infrastructure. Modernizing operations is the “end game” of the digitization phase, which is foundational to the digital transformation journey—establishing an operational backbone is the objective many forward-leaning companies have pursued diligently in the past few years.
Operational excellence is now the minimum requirement for being competitive in the digital age. Let’s explore.
The Old Models of Scaling Won’t Work Anymore
For many, digitization has been the goal for years. The pandemic lockdowns were a coercive force pushing companies to send their employees home to work; thus, digitizing many aspects of their operations. Correctly digitizing operations move the organization further to become a digital company. That is being able to offer digital-value propositions to its customers.
Scalability used to be strictly about increasing profitability and improving efficiency when workload increases. It is also about adding new value propositions (digitization) at speeds that can keep up.
Older ways of doing things will work for a short while, but it won’t take long for businesses to fall too far behind.
Companies have used a siloed way of doing business since day one. Managers would create systems, data, and processes within business silos. Leaders often fail to consider how their systems and processes might eventually need to coordinate with other parts of the business. Once they recognized integration requirements, they’d tweak the systems and processes to achieve their objective, again within their given silo. Managers would address the need for linking systems and processes. The operational environment was complex, hierarchical, and too slow to be effective in today’s digital business world.
The New Dynamic in Scaling Operations – Digital Transformation
According to a December 11, 2020 article by McKinsey & Company, companies worldwide are hard at work evolving their operating models at unprecedented speed.
The hurdles go far beyond shifting back and forth between remote, in-office, and hybrid work models or simply adding or subtracting work-from-home talent as needed.
Digitization enhances operational excellence.
We’re talking about creating a coherent set of enterprise systems, data, and processes supporting core operations. Becoming digital enhances the customer value proposition.
Don’t confuse digitization (doing things we’ve always done only better) with digital transformation (doing things differently than we’ve done before). Being digital enhances the customer value proposition.
Business leaders who think they’re leveraging digital transformation strategy when, in fact, they’re just digitizing some aspect of their operations may achieve operational excellence on an outdated value proposition. For example, you are a taxi company that’s just perfected its operations (digitization). Suddenly Uber and Lyft arrive (digital companies). How’s that going to impact your business? Or consider the impact Amazon has on traditional retailers.
The Next Generation Model of Scaling
This operational backbone, or next-generation operating model, is a new way of running an organization. Next-generation operating models replace messy legacy systems, processes, and data generated by siloed business units. The new design is more open and non-linear. Systems, data, and processes become like the building blocks of a lego kit. that can reallocate resources and develop new digital capabilities in a matter of weeks. Now that’s a challenge.
No wonder, despite Herculean efforts and substantial investment, few companies can move to a modern, digitally-enabled way of working across the entirety of their operations.
A McKinsey survey of more than 1,000 companies indicates about one-third successfully roll out a new operating model.
Einstein is Never Wrong and Why Scaling in the Cloud is the Right Call Now
In their book “Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make it and Why the Rest Don’t,” Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles explain scaling all aspects of an organization (including the technology) by quoting Albert Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Harnish goes on to say, “Scaling a business is a complex endeavor and requires robust – yet simple enough – tools and techniques to get the job done.”
Author of the book “Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make it While the Rest Don’t,” Verne Harnish speaks to an audience of entrepreneurs.
That’s why companies worldwide are attracted to cloud-based applications and workflow as they try to scale. It’s robust enough to handle their “complex endeavor” but with tools simple enough to be implemented and utilized by a fast-growing internal team of employees.
Verne Harnish also helps us envision the stages of scaling infrastructure when he writes, “When you go from two employees to 10, you need better phone systems and more structured space. When your company reaches 50 employees, you still need space and phones. You suddenly also require an accounting system that shows precisely which projects, customers, or products make money. Between 50 and 360 employees, your information-technology systems need to be upgraded and integrated. And above that, you must revamp them again….”
The Two Pizza Rule – Everyone Needs Access, but Not Everyone Needs Their Own Pizza
Amazon has the “two pizza rule.” By it, they mean that no team should be any bigger than can be fed with two pizzas. While that works for physical teams, it doesn’t work for your IT. If you’re going to scale your personnel, you have to scale up your IT – applications, cloud assets, infrastructure, etc. You can’t scale with a “two pizza” rule for your IT infrastructure. Sure, everybody needs access to the “pizza,” but not all your employees are going to need the same key or even access to the same kind of “pizza” as other employees. Scaling technology isn’t simple and requires a partner who understands how the organization’s goals, people, and roles all funnel into the need for tech access as the company scales.
Harness Cloud-based Data Power to Inform Your Scaling Strategy
Your data for your KPIs has to scale – and evolve – with you. Big data, IoT, and AI can help your business leverage more granular data than ever before. Today, under the direction of Reed Hastings, Netflix is a prime example of how scaling a company’s IT can result in game-changing data usage. As Netflix tracks every action of its 213 million-plus subscribers, it can accurately predict what shows, and movies from its production wing will be successful. With this visibility into customers comes the ability to be nimble and agile with their service delivery.
Alfred DuPont Chandler, Jr, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his 1977 book, “The Visible Hand: Managerial Revolution in American Business,” wrote extensively about modern corporations’ scale and management structures.
Where Did Outdated Scaling Models Originate? – The Industrial Revolution
Alfred Chandler, Jr is one of the most respected figures in business history. His work redefined industrialization’s business and economic history and gave us a fresh perspective on how the modern digital firm differs from the industrial-age model.
Managerial firms, according to Chandler, evolved to take advantage of productive techniques available after the establishment of rail networks. More profits came from higher productivity and lower costs. America’s “managerial class” arose from this operating model where managers coordinate increasingly complex and interdependent systems.
The New Kind of Firm & a New Way to Scale
Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani’s HBR article of Winter 2021, “Competing in the Age of AI,” describes how Chandler’s model focuses on the benefits for those companies that successfully achieve greater production scope, and/or variety. On-going efforts to improve added learning as a key characteristic of successful scaling.
“Scale, scope, and learning have come to be considered the essential drivers of a firm’s operating performance. And for a long time, they’ve been enabled by carefully defined business processes that rely on labor and management to deliver products and services to customers, and that are reinforced by traditional IT systems. After hundreds of years of incremental improvements to the industrial model, the digital firm is now radically changing the scale, scope, and learning paradigm.
AI-driven processes can be scaled up much more rapidly than traditional processes can, allow for much greater scope because they can easily be connected with other digitalized businesses, and create incredibly powerful opportunities for learning and improvement, like the ability to produce ever more accurate and sophisticated customer-behavior models and then tailor services accordingly.”
The Foundation of Operational Excellence
Becoming digital is an essential watershed for any modern company.. Leveraging SMACIT, digital expands and accelerates innovation. However, companies cannot afford to neglect the pursuit of operational excellence.
Executing a business strategy that is consistent, reliable, and cost-effective is foundational to sustained business health. Operational excellence is also the mindset that embraces constant and never-ending improvement. Continuous attention to pursuing operational excellence means every employee can see, deliver, and enhance the flow of value to customers.
The constant pressure for all companies is a perfect storm of demands that include the speed of delivery, technology, and communication acceleration. Every employee from the top down is busy making decisions and exploring ideas. They don’t have the time to waste on broken operational processes. Information technology that encompasses systems, processes, and data must make things easier for employees and customers alike.
Perfecting the business model via digital transformation has been key to the expansion and domination of household brands today.
The iPod is a line of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The first version, released on October 23, 2001, about eight and a half months after the Macintosh version of iTunes.
Apple began its journey in 1976 and slowly climbed, but its rocket ship of success didn’t go into orbit until 2001 – 25 years later – when the iPod was released. Their launch into this new realm was only made possible with the scalable technologies needed to supply and service the massive demand for the iPod, and its succeeding generations of small devices for the mass market.
Our story begins in 1971 along the cobblestone streets of Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market. Here, Starbucks opened its first store, offering fresh-roasted coffee beans, tea, and spices from around the world for our customers to take home. They started by selling coffee beans roasted by Peet’s, a gourmet coffee company in Berkeley, California, then began roasting their own. A year later, Howard Schultz came on board as CEO, urging Starbucks opened its first espresso bar in 1984.
Starbucks also had its learning curve. The company took 20 years from 1971 to perfect its business model and underlying corporate technologies to scale from 100 locations in 1991 to 18,000 locations in 62 countries today.
But that was then, back before the availability of cloud resources. Now, the cloud, and cloud-based technologies, can propel companies, big and small, into a new stratosphere of capability within a short amount of time.
Investing in Scaling Tech Capability Pays Off
While you expect a company like JP Morgan Chase to be investing heavily in technology, what may not quickly come to mind is that they have been investing in tech all along the way as they scaled the business. They are investing in IT-based workflow advancements because that investment pays off. JP Morgan Chase has more than 50,000 technology professionals and invests eleven billion per year in its digital development.
But JP Morgan chase isn’t the only big-name company where we see investment in tech as a part of a scaling strategy. In 2018, Walmart chose to bring on an additional 1,700 IT staffers. To quote USA Today, they “beefed up” their “omnichannel presence to better compete with Amazon, Costco, and other peers.”
The result?
Walmart’s stock rose by 17% over the next two years.
While neither JP Morgan Chase nor Walmart took on massive “scaling” projects over the past two years (not many did), we can guess that the industry leaders see technology as the business expansion enabler that it is.
In Conclusion
Scalability is a necessary ingredient to future-proofing your network. Businesses have survived without a scalable network, but that won’t be true as we move into this decade.
Business leaders must liberate their companies from legacy systems, safeguard their data, and continuously conserve costs by implementing technology that fits where they’re at and where they’re going strategically. Scaling a business with agility and resiliency can only be achieved by embracing new technology, and that begins by designing an IT environment built for the digital age.
Success in 2022 is going to be about flexibility and scalability. If you’re going to compete and win, the cloud environment will be critical to your success.
Choose options that allow enough elasticity for you to reimagine what optimal scalability means to you.
Lay the groundwork so that there’s a solid foundation. That way, your digital journey will move forward with incredible, even inspiring, momentum.
What Happens When You Need to Scale Your Business?
If you want to scale up your peanut butter factory, you get a bigger building, bigger hoppers, giant dehulling, and processing machines. It takes months, maybe years. But what if you’re not in the peanut butter business?
What if you run an architectural firm, a company in the travel industry, or even an up-and-coming animation or gaming business?Well, you don’t need the peanut processing machines, but you’re going to need serious computing capability. To get that computing capacity, you’ve got two choices.
Choice #1 – You can invest months and significant capital in on-site servers and workstations. Time will drag on while you get an IT professional to design the system, order the servers, install the servers, set up the applications, etc.
Even if you’re willing to put big bucks into on-site infrastructure, you won’t.
Why?
Because 2022 is all about flexibility.
Everything from 2019 to today has demonstrated that the companies that can scale up and down with the most speed and agility win the race.
The big deals aren’t going to wait for you to get your on-site IT systems up to speed, and you’ll miss out.
So, let’s talk about the better option.
Choice #2 – DaaS or Desktop as a Service
What is Desktop as a Service (DaaS)?
DaaS is a cloud-based workflow solution that gives you access to a virtual desktop in the cloud with your applications, operating system, and personal settings all in place. You can access your virtual desktop securely from any internet-connected device, regardless of location. Because all the computing power is in the cloud, virtual desktops can be set up or “deployed” for new employees within minutes compared to days and weeks with traditional, on-site infrastructure. Scaling back is just as efficient and straightforward.
But wait, not all DaaS solutions are the right fit for your company. Some offer more control and flexibility than others. Some virtual desktops demonstrate much better responses when using demanding graphic applications.
These clients need reliable access to intensive graphics resources worldwide, and performance matters. Check out IronOrbit’s DaaS solution called INFINITY Workspaces.
So, let’s get back to the question.
How Does DaaS Help Your Company Scale Up Faster?
1. Employees Can Use Their Favorite Device – BYOD
Because DaaS provides all the computing power within the cloud (including all the applications, databases, etc., that your employee needs to get work done), an employee can use whatever computer they have and like. How does that help you? Well, you don’t have to source, buy, and provide high-end desktops and laptops. Sure, if you want to buy your employees’ laptops, that’s great, but if you’re going to get things up and running quickly, BYOD will work as a temporary stop-gap measure as you scale up and wait for your laptop order to arrive.
2. Expand Within the Cloud
The cloud is the clear winner compared to sourcing, buying, installing, and setting up in-house servers. Because cloud solutions like those offered through IronOrbit are nearly infinitely expandable, you never have to wonder whether your infrastructure has the capacity to handle the next pro-growth project you need to tackle.
3. Scale Without Huge Up-Front Investment
Perhaps the most attractive feature of DaaS solutions is that you only pay for what you need, and you don’t have to spend money to buy infrastructure up-front. Monthly subscription payments make paying for usage only easy. Scaling up is simplified when you don’t have to develop CapEx funds to get it rolling.
4. Scale Up Without Cybersecurity Worries
One of the challenges of scaling up with on-site infrastructure is the security component. It takes time and a team of cybersecurity professionals to deliver 24/7/365 protection. In stark contrast, the IronOrbit private cloud has world-class security. That high level of security is a protective umbrella that keeps your data safe while you ramp up operations quickly.
5. Even if You Have Existing On-Site IT Infrastructure – Hybrid Scaling
Companies that have invested in on-site infrastructure sometimes get tunnel vision for scaling, but it doesn’t have to be an either/or question. You don’t have to choose either the cloud or your on-site setup. If you have existing on-site IT infrastructure and need to scale up a specific business area or need extra capacity, DaaS is your best friend. Employees can use their virtual desktops across the company network and leverage cloud computing power, thus diminishing the load on your on-site infrastructure.
6. Get New and Remote Employees Up and Running Quickly
For the reasons mentioned above – cloud use and BYOD – DaaS is the perfect solution for efficiently computing resources for new employees.
Whether your employees are all in the office or scattered worldwide, you can provide them with access to their virtual desktop and all the company resources they need to do their job. DaaS deployment for new employees is lightning fast compared to traditional, on-site infrastructure and computers.
7. Streamlined, Remote Management, and Configuration
Updates, upgrades, configurations, and compliance adherence protocols can be pushed out to all your employees’ virtual desktops quickly and easily, helping you move the entire company along without the usual hassle and slowdowns associated with IT maintenance.
Wrapping it All Up
Let’s talk about your company for a minute. If scaling means hiring more people and giving them the IT resources necessary to handle more work and bigger deals, then DaaS is worth your serious consideration.
It’s the best way to scale up your IT resources without wasting time, money, and opportunity.
Call us for a free consultation at (888) 753-5060.
Scalability has always been an essential characteristic for companies to develop. Today, an organization’s capacity to scale quickly, effectively, and economically can mean the difference between winning new business or missing it altogether. At the rate business moves in 2022, the window of opportunity opens and closes quickly. Being prepared is essential.
An increase in scalability enables businesses to grow their capacity and capabilities effectively and with minimal disruption. The benefits of increased scalability extend beyond handling more business. The foundations required for modern scalability also deliver immense value in other areas, including:
· Enhanced & Improved Customer Experience
· Improved Resiliency
· Nimble Operations
· Highly Engaged & Motivated Employees
Scaling is complex and involves many moving parts ranging from building the right corporate culture to hiring high-performing talent, having the proper structure, and the financing to support it. Using the right technology is an essential ingredient, and that’s where this article will focus.
Everyone Benefits When People and Tech Work Together
Any discussion about technology and modern scalability involves leadership because leadership needs to communicate closely with internal IT and external technology partners. A technology engaged leadership is the only way an organization can prepare its people and culture to handle the growth. Improving scalability in the modern sense means a paradigm shift in how the company operates. The intention and drive to become a better company, to escalate its level of service to its customers, has got to be part of the equation, or attempt at scaling to any significant level will fly off the rails.
Complacent leadership or a culture of doing business-as-usual is one of the reasons companies procrastinate investing in upgrading their technology infrastructure. If current equipment is working, why mess with it?
A recent McKinsey report shows a slight improvement in companies trying between 2018 and 2020. This chart indicates while most companies have made progress modernizing their operations, less than one-third have moved beyond the pilot phase.
Legacy Systems Are More Susceptible to Cyber Attacks
This kind of reliance on legacy equipment not only hobbles any attempts at scaling, old hardware, and outdated operating systems are a disaster waiting to happen. Legacy systems are a significant cybersecurity risk.
Our articleWHY IS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SO IMPORTANT TO SUSTAINED SUCCESS (PART 1)? Explains the importance of having people with good communication skills leading technology, data, and processes. It would be best if you had good communicators knowledgeable about available technologies and how they can help. These consultants can help you rethink your operations from the top down. The right partner can also maintain and refresh technology roadmaps to ensure a consistent unified architecture (referred to as an “operational backbone” in the article mentioned above).
IronOrbit is the kind of partner who has the business operations experience and technical expertise to get your next-generation operating model started on solid footage..
Increasing scalability is a challenge for any company on multiple levels, but significant changes can become seamless with the right technology in place, at least from an IT perspective.
Talk to one of our consultants today. We can help get the conversation started and help you evaluate the best available options that are right for your business.
While not the magic bullet that solves all your operational problems, moving to the cloud forms the foundation of building a solid technology platform.
Businesses that took the opportunity to remake and future-proof their infrastructure and workforce during the pandemic will continue to pull ahead of the competition. As we move into 2022, it becomes imperative for companies to move to the cloud to accomplish two strategies:
Be agile and flexibly prepared for the unexpected
To Take advantage of emerging AI-enabled digital technologies
These two objectives mean large-scale changes to IT’s operating model. The more technology-savvy people in the company should take the lead in understanding what moving to the cloud would mean for the company. Target specific business areas and look at how having workflows on the cloud benefits operations through increased speed, flexibility, and scale, which are the standard hallmarks of having operations in a cloud environment.
Speed, Flexibility, & Scalability
If you want to deliver digital capabilities anywhere and everywhere, consider how the IronOrbit ecosystem uses the core capabilities of cloud computing to provide scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities. Our teams of engineers and business visionaries have taken the complexity out of migrating your environment to the cloud, so you benefit from faster time to value and reduced costs.
The improvements in productivity and efficiency can generate significant cost savings over time; however, the actual benefit delivery is optimizing IT functions. You’ll be doing things you’ve always done, but you’ll be doing them better, and your operations will be much more resistant to disruptions.
Introducing IOCentral
Our new automated self-service portal, IOCentral, delivers a fast and easy way to scale storage, networks, databases, and computer functionality. An intuitive interface allows you to scale business functions more quickly by connecting essential software and microservices. Using AI-enabled technology, IOCentral enables flexibility and comprehensive ecosystem management from one pane of glass.
Speed, flexibility, scalability, and reduced costs indeed represent long-term value, but those in and of themselves do not convey the urgency for moving to the cloud. For that, we need to look further ahead.
The Bigger Business Benefit of Moving to the Cloud
Taking full advantage of your move to the cloud means looking at the new possibilities available to your business because now your business is part of the global cloud ecosystem. The cloud now becomes a catalyst to build new capabilities and value propositions for your customers.
This larger prize focuses on building innovative practices, new sources of revenue, and learning from the unique knowledge flows that will inspire leadership, not IT, to create new digital value propositions for your customers.
Without the cloud, leadership will never be able to enter the competitive arena of 2022 and beyond, let alone have the possibility to innovate new products and services.
The Cloud Delivers All IT Services, Apps, and More.
Be ready to use new digital technologies and stay ahead of change. Call now for a proof-of-concept of how IronOrbit can prepare your business for sustained success.
Future-proofing is the process of preparing for anticipated (and unanticipated) business disruptions. It has always been problematic but is now even more of a challenge.
In this article, we’ll explore the “why” and “how” of future-proofing your business and provide actionable steps to take.
The Future-Proof Challenge of Quickly Evolving Technologies
The rapid acceleration of technology has made future-proofing a business exponentially tricky.
Jimmy Rotella, Sr Solutions Architect at Nvidia, said in a recent episode of “What’s Up AEC?!” that 2020 accelerated a work-from-home movement that was inevitably going to happen in 5 to 10 years.
In an October 2021 Harvard Business Review article, authors Michael Mankins, Eric Garton, and Dan Schwartz write, “technology was already changing the nature of work before Covid-19 took hold. Innovations were redefining the basis of competition in most industries and, consequently, the talent companies need to win over the long term.”
Companies held on by their fingernails for economic survival. The article points out that the businesses that took the lead in the aftermath were the ones who seized the opportunity to remake their organizations and adapt to the new environment.
Disruptors in the Marketplace
Business leaders are worried about what’s going to happen to their companies moving forward. KPMG reports that 74% of CEOs are afraid of some new company disrupting their business model.
Eastman Kodak, a 120-year-old company, declared bankruptcy. If business leaders do not manage ongoing innovation, they’ll be presiding over decline and collapse.
Companies look for indicators of possible future disruptions. Things could be going perfectly today, and the next thing you know, someone does it better than you, faster than you, and cheaper. Focus on solving specific problems for your customers. What will the market share be for a product or service in Q4 next year? How about the year after that? Part of this inquiry requires discovering where the weaknesses are in an organization. Spending more time on future-proofing an organization increases your chances of being more proactive instead of putting out fires as they happen.
The Statistics Aren’t on Your Side
Forty thousand companies out of one million will last over ten years. That means that 960,000 go out of business before their first ten years, and only 45 companies out of a million last 100 years.
Why are these figures so grim? What is it that makes preparing a business for future needs such a daunting task? To understand the background of the problem, let’s look at a parenting metaphor.
Parents spend nearly twenty years preparing their children to enter the adult world. In essence, those parents are “future-proofing their children. After all, Mom and Dad don’t know what the world will be like when the children reach adulthood, what kind of people they will encounter, what troubles will come their way, and what dangers they will face. The children will have to be self-sufficient, capable, and adaptable to the inevitable change that will take place during their lifetime.
Your business is no different.
It must be prepped for any eventuality. Every variable is considered.
As we have experienced over the past few years, the future is uncertain. But, with the right preparations, your business can move confidently into the future. The right technologies and strategies can put a forward-leaning company ahead of the competition that hasn’t invested in preparedness.
Let’s explore future-proofing your business, so you can outpace your competition when the next market fluctuation takes them by surprise.
The Connection Between Future-Proofing and Your Company’s Lifecycle
Tendayi Viki, an author, and corporate innovation expert gave an insightful keynote address at the 2019 Solita Meeting Point, where he drew direct connections between future-proofing companies and their lifecycle.
Tendayi Viki, an author, and corporate innovation expert, gave an insightful keynote address at the 2019 Solita Meeting Point. He said all business models have a life cycle, and the problem many companies make is taking the life cycle of a business model and making it the same thing as the life cycle of the company. These cannot be the same thing if you want to future-proof an organization because it chains the two life cycles together. Future-proofing should develop a portfolio of business models (not to be confused with a portfolio of products) that balance risk and return.
McKinsey reports that only 6% of executives are satisfied with their company’s innovation.
Implementing multiple business models is a strategy to gain a durable advantage and strengthen resiliency against disruptive forces.
Coming up with ideas isn’t so much a problem as shaping those ideas into new value propositions that resonate with customers. Combine those value propositions into sustainably profitable business models. New value propositions require innovation. The objective is to build a portfolio of rising and fall business models to strengthen resiliency.
Reduce uncertainty by experimenting with ideas so that they become sources of revenue.
Innovation Readiness – Embedding Flexibility Into the Future of Your Business
As work and customer transactions continue to grow in a virtual environment, the need to experiment with ideas and business models in the digital realm will grow. Experimentation requires a purposeful engagement between leadership, employees, and technology.
According to the previously mentioned Harvard Business Review article, few business leaders “manage engagement with technology in a coordinated way, so employees become suspicious of it, and the technology underperforms management expectations. That’s a pity because when people and tech work together, everyone benefits.”
The article tells how USAA Insurance uses an integrated approach to developing and deploying AI-enabled tools. The use of next-generation technology frees up people on the claims team to focus on helping customers. “This kind of work is more satisfying for the people and better leverages their capabilities.”
The Future with Your Customers
One aspect of preparedness that makes becoming digital a competitive necessity comes from the customer engagement side.
As Deloitte reports, in nearly every industry across the globe today, customer expectations continue to rise. An explosion of device types and data means that most consumers now expect personalized experiences and increased access to increased amounts of information, when and where they need it. As the number of touchpoints grows, the customer wants “same customer” recognition at every point of interaction. Customer service is more than easy engagement. Today’s customer wants to be necessary each step of the way.
Customers expect products and services tailored to them in personalized, contextual interactions. Customers also wish to read reviews from other customers. The days of siloed IT systems and business functions are behind us, and those who do not realize this will soon be out of business. There is genuine pressure today, much more than a couple of years ago, to digitize operations and become digital companies. There is no time to lose.
These are the four interrelated trends culminating in unraveling the old management rules and the traditional structure of organizations. (source: McKinsey Reports)
Future-Proofing Your Profitability
A recent McKinsey report found that the top 20 percent of companies earn 95 percent of economic profit. Any organization that isn’t seeking new approaches is on borrowed time. By leveraging current technologies and embracing experimentation, organizations can discover new ways of doing things that are not as fragile and vulnerable to unpredictability.
Companies must define data, business, and infrastructure components and design them for reuse to succeed digitally. Reconsider customer offerings in terms of individual components (see the Lego analogy in Part 2 of Why is Digital Transformation So Important to Sustained Success?). One of the powerful benefits of being digital is the repository of reusable business, data, and infrastructure components.
The “How” of Future-Proofing – Operational Backbone and the Digital Platform
The operational backbone supports core business processes and relates to operational excellence. This set of systems is the cost of entry for doing business digitally into the future. In Designed for Digital, Jeanne Ross explains that companies with an adequate operational backbone are 2.5 times as agile and 44% more innovative than companies without an operational backbone. The digital platform, built on a foundation of cloud services, delivers new sources of revenue, leveraging the capabilities of digital technology to enhance customer engagement and solve customer problems. Digitizing operations is a much easier and shorter journey. Most companies experienced a certain amount of it during the pandemic when they had to, under duress, move to remote work environments. Full-on digital transformation is an ongoing process.
Think of it as a journey. New technologies show up on the horizon so frequently that companies have to adapt and adopt almost on the fly. Operating on legacy systems will make this level of agility impossible. Traditional siloed business environments will also prevent progress. It’s far too slow.
The traditional hierarchy of the corporate organizational chart is mechanical by design. Built on antiquated 18th and 19th Century Industrial Revolution ideas, the focus was uniformity, bureaucracy, and control. These are the antithesis of what companies need to focus on today. Now we need creativity, elasticity, and speed.
Protecting Your Data into the Future
From a technology perspective, companies must build ways to capture and store data because even if they don’t know how to make practical use of this gold mine of information now, they will figure it out shortly. An essential aspect of paradigm-shifting towards a future-proof strategy is realizing how important data will become for the long-term success of your business. Think in terms of components and modular applications. These are things that can repurpose for something else. Tap into the power and multiple benefits of accessible scalability-based technologies. Learning to utilize connecting and scaling data will enable companies to develop new products and digital value propositions.
A Future-Proofed IT Environment
In Four Factors to Help You Future-Proof Your IT Environment, Vivek Agarwal writes, “future-proofing means taking steps so you’re able to flex and expand as needed for as-yet-unknown needs and opportunities.” He goes on to explain how the cloud can make companies more agile in meeting customer needs. Moving away from traditional data centers into scalable cloud infrastructure can make enterprises nimbler and more adaptable.
“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” – Alexander Den Heijer
Your core business – the value you deliver to your customers – is the flower that must be protected and nurtured.
With the evolution of technology and fluctuations in the market, the soil that your core business is in may change.
Future-proofing your business means fortifying the core business to thrive in whatever soil conditions it finds itself.
CONCLUSION
As a technology website, we are writing about technology and how digitization impacts all levels of business and the customer experience. But here’s the thing, technology is only a means to an end. Let’s summarize your next steps in the future-proofing your business.
Take advantage of cloud-based tools and digitizing operations to future-proof your business. They are merely ways to grease the rails of adopting new ways of doing things and liberate the most precious of your resources – people – from tedious manual input tasks.
Build easily scalable systems. Scalability will also impact flexibility so that management can focus on inspiring and revitalizing their teams and organizations.
Shift your team’s focus from reacting to the unexpected to one of possibility thinking. Human creativity and resilience work best in flexible environments that nurture growth, reward their strengths, and help compensate for their weaknesses.
Scaling up is the ability to take on increased workloads in a cost-effective manner and meet the demands of your business without suffering the negative consequences of overreaching.
Scaling up sounds like a fantastic idea. After all, who wouldn’t want to be able to handle more work, delivering more goods and services while leveraging economies of scale for greater profitability?
But the promise of scaling is often like an iceberg. What you see above the water (the work to be done) is nothing compared to the work lurking under the water. These are the challenges faced in scaling a business. Some companies get to a point where it is painful to add another client or bring on more talent. Scaling up seems like piling on more overhead for less reward. Revenue never has a chance to turn into profits.
Here are some barriers many companies may face as they ramp up their operations.
Scaling Up Too Soon
A good question to ask a good business consultant is, Is it too soon to grow the business? Any time before you have all the pieces in place and a strategy to scale is too soon. Is the market is ready to embrace and demand your products or services? Timing is everything. First, to go big into the market is sometimes a good idea, but sometimes not. Companies get eaten alive and never recover.
No Plan to Scale Up
Often the small to mid-size business fails in the efforts to scale for lack of planning. They have an objective and a vague notion of how to get there. Growth-minded companies might partner with that vendor or hire new employees. But all too often, a structured plan is missing. Having a strategy that guides the requirements, stages, and timeline for scaling is foundational for success. As a result, the timing is off, and the company is missing pieces of the puzzle. Frustration and failure soon follow.
No Understanding of the Difference Between Growth and Scaling
For most successful companies, growth came before scaling up. Taking time to grow allows SOPs to be established and perfected. Taking the time to grow enables hiring key people and building a solid reputation. These things are critical for financial backing to scale. Growth is a time to experiment and approve or discard strategic partners and vendors. Growth helps them understand the management and IT resources required for successful scaling. Multiplying processes and output without a substantial increase in resources is the foundation of scalability. Business leaders need to know if the company is prepared to scale up.
Unnecessary or Untimely Product/Service Additions
As soon as a company begins to have a little bit of success in their efforts to scale, they often become overzealous with their efforts to take over the marketplace.
They may move away from their core business too quickly and begin advertising products and services they are not prepared to deliver. Even if they can make a dollar on those tangential goods and services, they are taking resources away from what is central to their current revenue stream and their ability to scale.
Selecting the Wrong Partners & Vendors
Companies across the planet have learned the wrong partners or vendors can put companies at risk. Long supply chains and unproven vendors can have detrimental consequences on the delivery of goods and services to your customers, as well as injure brand reputations.
Avoid vendors and strategic partners who over promise and under deliver. There is no room for freeloading. Everyone has to do their part.
Lack of Internal Communication
Employees need to know the company culture and what is expected. Companies need complete buy-in from their workforce to scale up successfully. There also must be a strategy communicated internally. Along with the nuts and bolts of your well-laid strategy is a minefield of employee concerns, expectations, and emotions that you must address. If employees feel left out of the loop – or worse, insecure in their jobs – they will not be best positioned to support scaling efforts. Internal communication requires more than just a company-wide meeting or a series of internal memos sent out to senior staff. Instead, the business leaders must keep their finger on the pulse of how the staff is acclimating to the proposed and in-progress changes.
Verne Harnish’s book Scaling Upshows how to improve scalability. Scalability requires putting the right team together and then educating them on the growth strategies of the company. Articulate a clear vision for meeting future goals regularly.
The last decision Steve Jobs made was to build Apple University.
He knew that it would be the one legacy he’d leave behind so that his organization would thrive long after he was gone.
Cutting Prices
Once you’ve been able to leverage some economies of scale, there is often a temptation to cut prices to undercut the competition and gain more market share. “After all,” you think, “We’re still making the same amount on our goods/services.” While it’s tempting to cut your prices and try to push the competition out of business, the money you will lose is better saved and utilized within your scaling efforts.
Technology That Can’t (or Can’t Easily) Scale-Up
Whether you’re working with legacy systems that keep your productivity limited, or you’re working with on-site workstations and servers that are expensive and cumbersome to scale, your technology is limiting your potential. This roadblock used to be a nearly insurmountable one for businesses trying to scale on a budget. However, with advances in cloud-based IT infrastructure and Desktop as a Service, the financial hurdle considerations are lowered due to the cloud’s ability to scale with your business expansion. Companies across the planet have factored cloud computing ability into their scaling strategy and are successfully leveraging the flexibility, mobility, and cost-effective nature of cloud workflow assets.
As an IBM fellow, Jason McGee puts it, migrating applications to the cloud can deliver significant business benefits for companies of all sizes.
Failing to Create Long-Term Demand
Business leaders that fundamentally misunderstand the role of advertising and marketing often pin their hopes of scaling on the stop-and-go stutter-step of marketing efforts. While marketing strategy should always be a part of your scaling endeavor, it is not sufficient on its own to supply continuous, qualified customers. Instead, part of any scaling strategy should be a plan to grow market demand for your products/services. After all, you want them knocking on your door for what you provide; you don’t want to be chasing work constantly with ad campaigns.
Cash Flow and Credit
There is no way around it, scaling requires sufficient cash flow. Many organizations with a fantastic plan to scale launch that endeavor, only to find that their efforts are stymied by lack of on-hand cash or credit. In a recent episode of “What’s Up AEC?!” the Immediate Past Board Chair of ACEC National, Charles Gozdziewski warns about the cash flow aspect of scaling up too quickly. “I’ve seen small firms suddenly become part of a big project. They go from 10 people to 25 people and then they go bankrupt. They just don’t have the financing or financial knowledge to handle it.”
Each stage of your scaling strategy will require more financial backing, and that backing must be available at that stage or things begin to unravel. Setting yourself up for success requires ensuring that you will have the backing you need well in advance of your step to the next level of operational expansion.
Scaling up starts and ends with individuals. Make sure you have the right people in the right seats.
Quality Employees Instead of Quantity
Scaling starts and ends with individuals. Whether you are in a service industry or manufacture goods, your employees can make or break your scaling prospects. As much as anything else, scaling requires the right beliefs and behavior. Growth-oriented companies need people who are comfortable with change, who can move fast, and take ownership of tasks. In the rush to scale, companies often hire too quickly and find that they experience internal roadblocks to productivity because of the unqualified staff they’ve hired. Unfortunately, companies that are quickly ramping up delivery of goods and services often don’t have time for extensive employee training or the flexibility for employees to learn “on the job.” A resourceful HR team should be among your first hires to help ensure that your business sources and hires employees that can step in and do the work without handholding.
Ignoring Growth Pains and Fixating on Growth Pains
Whether leadership is determined not to let that “one issue” hold things back or fixate on that “one issue” to the detriment of other things that require attention, it still lands the administration in a difficult spot. On the one hand, small issues at one stage of scaling can become mountains of pain in the next stage of expansion. On the other, a fixation with a specific issue can lead to an unhealthy overemphasis on one aspect of the business, throwing everything out of kilter.
To scale, you must be aware of growing pains and be able to handle them appropriately without devoting all your attention and resources to those problems.
Micromanagement
Organizations with micromanagers at the top very often do not do well when it comes to scaling up operations. Delegating responsibility is an essential component of scaling an enterprise. A business leader must know their self well enough to see this tendency in themselves before it becomes an issue that derails the scaling process. Sometimes, it’s necessary to step into a different leadership role and allow someone that has delegation skills to fill that administrative slot. As you scale, so should your management structure. Finding the right role for you to play and bringing in the people you need to bolster your weaknesses is a sign of a good leader.
In Conclusion
Despite significant roadblocks to developing capacities to scale up quickly, there are multiple benefits for an organization to prepare itself for the likelihood of scaling up.
The challenges of scaling up are complex because scalability isn’t just about growth. It also has to do with its ability to be flexible, agile, and versatile. The same things that position the business for expansion are the same things that prepare them for unknown shifts in the market and unforeseen events like a worldwide pandemic. Preparedness is all about becoming proactive and being strategic with digital technology.
In a Forbes article from March 1, 2021, Paolo Gallo and Giuseppe Stigliano write, “Because of the dizzying speed of change today, fueled by this umpteenth acceleration, companies can’t count on their strengths alone to innovate. The CEO of a mobility services company reminded us how crucial it is at this stage to build eco-systems, resisting the temptation to reduce them to ego-systems. We have to collaborate with third parties to build systems in which the individual parts function as a single entity, in a more or less continual way to provide high-value-added services to final customers. Companies have to see themselves as fluid platforms, capable together of providing a value proposition that is exponentially bigger than what they could offer alone.”
In one of our previous blogs, we stressed the importance of componentization as a key ingredient to offering new digital value propositions. Taking the time to componentize offerings and build a solid digital foundation for your company will also position it for agility, flexibility, and growth.
The in-depth Deloitte Insights article, Putting Digital at the Heart of Strategy, goes beyond pointing out that digital transformation enables new growth opportunities. It indicates that those companies that don’t digitize in the next five years will be doomed.
Digitizing operations, a key benefit of cloud computing, improves an organization’s ability to meet sudden increases (or decreases) in demand.
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Hardware casings, cords, adaptors, and other electrical products are called E-waste. E-waste is a growing problem. Significant environmental damage happens because nature cannot absorb these products. E-Waste is a significant contributor to the haphazard disposal of old electronics: they’re inert. All E-Waste products contain hazardous materials of one kind or another. The toxic materials are predominantly lead and mercury.
On-premises servers and data centers use substantial amounts of energy both for running and cooling. The manufacturing, packaging, and shipping of the hardware and peripheral products also add to GHG emissions. Companies can reduce emissions considerably by moving to a cloud computing environment. Once a company moves to the cloud, they use shared data centers. Like the ones operated by IronOrbit, shared data centers run far more efficiently than individual facilities or on-premises servers. There is no longer a need for personal equipment.
