Blog Post
More than 91% of companies are actively pursuing digital transformation strategies. Among senior business executives, nearly 87% prioritize digitalization as a key focus. This strategic shift is aimed at lifting revenue, driving efficiencies, and creating new opportunities for growth. However, not all businesses are getting the results they want.
In fact, research from McKinsey shows that the majority of businesses have only achieved a quarter of their expected cost savings. To help you overcome the hurdles that impact so many initiatives, we’ve collected five of the most compelling digital transformation examples. If you want to discover how these companies have leveraged technology to optimize their processes and improve their bottom line, keep reading.
What Is Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is the strategic integration of digital technologies with existing processes, operations, and customer experiences to create additional value. Organizations can apply digital transformation across many domains, including production lines, warehousing, predictive maintenance, and supply chain management.
Why Digital Transformation Is Important for Your Manufacturing or Distribution Business
Manufacturers and distributors that embrace digital transformation place themselves ahead of the competition and in an ideal position to succeed. Instead of being blindsided by new technologies, you become a disruptor in your industry and unlock new ways to optimize operations and grow your business.
Here’s why digital transformation is so important for your business:
- Greater Efficiency: Automate repetitive tasks and free up valuable resources, allowing staff to focus on strategic initiatives.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: Streamline processes and offer faster, more accurate service, enhancing customer experiences and building loyalty.
- Enhanced Scalability: Easily scale operations without being hampered by manual processes.
- Reduced Costs: Reduce labor costs through automation and minimize expenses associated with errors and inefficiencies.
5 Real-World Digital Transformation Examples
Digital transformation enables businesses to provide better customer experiences through continuous automation, improved accuracy and greater flexibility. Here are five real-world examples of these ideas in action:
1. Enhancing Customer Service with Continuous Automation: Graybar
A broken process. That’s what Graybar, a Fortune 500 distribution company, felt about their manual order entry workflow. It was riddled with errors and inefficiencies, creating massive headaches every time transaction volumes were high. So, Graybar turned to digital transformation. More specifically, the company implemented Conexiom’s order automation platform to eliminate manual entry errors, enhance productivity, and significantly improve customer service. Over six months, they processed 83,000 documents with 9.5 million line items entirely without manual intervention. Seamless, fast processing meant that customer orders were handled quickly and accurately, elevating overall customer satisfaction.
2. Improving Customer Experience: Sonepar
Sonepar is a global leader in B2B distribution, with reported sales of over €33.6bn in 2023. Like many companies that embrace digital transformation, their journey started with the identification of a core need. In this case, it was the desire for a more flexible and accurate solution to handle order entries. Their existing optical character recognition (OCR) system just wasn’t cutting it. The answer was to retool their order management workflow to incorporate Conexiom. With Conexiom, Sonepar was able to process 200,000 lines and save over 1,000 hours of manual work every month. With more time on their hands, Sonepar’s inside sales team is now able to focus on delivering superior customer service and acquiring new clients.
3. Unlocking Human Capital: Genpak
For decades, Genpak has been one of the top food service packaging and manufacturing companies. However, there was a time when Genpak was struggling against inefficient order processing, which was leading to more calls to customer service and bogging down operations. To alleviate this problem, they searched for an automated order processing system. Conexiom provided Genpak with a tailored solution that processed all orders instantly with 100% data accuracy. This freed up 75 hours weekly for their service representatives to redirect to customer-facing activities, improving service quality, and managing demand spikes.
4. Maximizing Sales Effectiveness: ADI Global Distribution
For some, digital transformation holds the keys to increasing efficiency, for others, it provides the necessary ability to scale without overburdening processes and workflows. Managing complex sales orders across 14 different countries was a difficult process requiring significant manual work and many repetitive tasks for ADI Global, a leading distributor with over 100,000 customers around the world.
With Conexiom’s order processing solution, ADI Global was able to use digital transformation to automatically handle their 1,200 trading partners, improving sales effectiveness and operational efficiency across their international operations. Thanks to automation, ADI Global had the tools it needed to manage its global operations more effectively, ensuring seamless order processing and improved sales performance.
5. Transforming Customer Experience: Revere Electric Supply
Running a distribution business constantly forces you to make choices. Resources are limited, and determining the best strategies to apply them can be difficult. When Revere Electric Supply was being driven by high order volumes into choosing between fast, accurate order processing and high-quality customer service, the leadership recognized it was time for a change. Through digital transformation, the company shifted its employees’ focus from order entry to enhancing customer service by implementing Conexiom. With Conexiom, the company completely automated order processing, allowing it to reallocate resources to improve customer interactions and support. This led to more customer engagement and increased customer satisfaction.
How Conexiom Can Help Your Digital Transformation
Digital technology can without a doubt transform your manufacturing or distribution company for the better. Offering enhanced efficiencies, the ability to provide better customer service, and lower costs, embracing digital transformation is the only way to succeed in the modern digital age.
However, securing these advantages is far from straightforward for many organizations seeking to become a digital transformation example of excellence.
Conexiom specializes in automating the handling of invoices, sales orders, and vendor order acknowledgements, enabling seamless integration and enhancing operational efficiency across various business processes.
Here's how Conexiom can drive your digital transformation journey
Automated Order Processing Excellence
- Transforms customer and supplier emails into accurate digital transactions
- Conexiom processes over one billion order lines annually and manages 7.5+ million automated validations, conversions, and transformations daily
Significant Cost Reduction and Profit Margin Improvement
- Averages 30% lower costs for processing and fulfilling orders and invoices
- Reduces total cost per invoice by 44%
Enhanced Accuracy and Error Reduction
- Cuts processing errors by 49%
- Reduces the average $17,831 cost per error
- Achieves the highest AI accuracy rate in the industry for document and field-level transactions
Improved Customer Satisfaction and Retention
- Increases On-Time, In-Full Shipments by 22%
- Reduces customer churn by 35%
- Enables automation for all without customers changing their ordering methods
Accelerated Invoice and Order Processing
- Achieves 44% faster invoice processing times
- Reduces order cycle times by 30%
- Processes invoices faster to avoid late fees and collect discounts efficiently
Increased Operational Efficiency
- Doubles the capacity of customer service teams
- Allows staff to focus on value-added activities and problem-solving
- Saves companies an average of 25% in administrative expenses
Enhanced Supply Chain Visibility and Integration
- Provides essential visibility into suppliers, improving order acknowledgment
- Supports rapid deployment and integration with leading ERP systems
- Improves order accuracy by 37% with electronic order acknowledgments
Learn more about how Conexiom can help you become another successful digital transformation example by delighting customers, winning new business, and boosting your profit margins.