Digital transformation: how to be successful at any size

The start-up’s story: a cheeky approach to digital-first

The Cheeky Pan­da may be a mere six years old but it’s already flour­ish­ing. The pro­duc­er of bam­boo-based paper prod­ucts was recent­ly val­ued at £75m, thanks to its focus on the dou­ble zeit­geist of hygiene and sus­tain­abil­i­ty and its future-ready, future-proof dig­i­tal set up.   

The two-per­son start-up was found­ed by cou­ple Chris Forbes and Julie Chen. It has always been keen on adopt­ing soft­ware as a ser­vice, an off-the-shelf prod­uct, and automat­ing the back office as much as pos­si­ble, enabling it to scale effi­cient­ly, Forbes says. 

“We start­ed off as most start-ups do, using account­ing sys­tems like Xero or Sage. But in 2019, which was still very ear­ly, we adopt­ed an enter­prise resource plan­ning (ERP) sys­tem with a view that all of our sys­tems would hang off it. We can run a com­pli­cat­ed order capture/order ful­fil­ment process with one click of a but­ton,” he explains. 

Forbes points to The Cheeky Panda’s tech stack, where each ele­ment is ‘plug and play’, whether it’s an ecom­merce plat­form or cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment (CRM) sys­tem.

“We have a com­po­nent-based archi­tec­ture: you can add things and take them away. It means that if you become out­sized in one par­tic­u­lar area, you don’t have to com­plete­ly trans­form the whole stack. You just take that piece off and put anoth­er on top of it.”

In fact, The Cheeky Pan­da hasn’t real­ly under­gone a process of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion in the same sense that larg­er, lega­cy com­pa­nies might. Rather, it start­ed out as dig­i­tal-first. How­ev­er, the business’s tech make-up means it’s more than a match for the demands of future dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion trends. 

Forbes may have a head start in under­stand­ing how to build a dig­i­tal­ly future-proofed busi­ness from the ground up, hav­ing helped build PwC’s con­sul­tan­cy busi­ness in a for­mer life. “I’ve met thou­sands of archi­tects so I’ve used the knowl­edge of what world-class archi­tec­ture looks like and that’s shaped the foun­da­tion of what we’ve got.” 

Forbes’s archi­tec­ture may be neat and high­ly cus­tomis­able, but he believes it is vision, not tech­nol­o­gy that lies at the heart of suc­cess­ful trans­for­ma­tion. “Tech­nol­o­gy might be cool but what is it going to deliv­er for your busi­ness? As long as you under­stand the fun­da­men­tals of the tech­nol­o­gy you’re using and what the end goal of the busi­ness is, it should give you a mid- to long-term view.” 

Striding into transformation: the medium-sized business 

To date, Walk the Walk World­wide – the marathon-focused breast can­cer char­i­ty – has raised £100m, with around half a mil­lion peo­ple tak­ing part in its chal­lenges. Start­ing out by post­ing spon­sor­ship forms, the char­i­ty now runs a sophis­ti­cat­ed web­site that also sup­ports email mar­ket­ing, event reg­is­tra­tion, fundrais­ing and social media activ­i­ty. 

Guy Aubertin is direc­tor of fundrais­ing and oper­a­tions at Walk the Walk. He describes how the charity’s process of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion evolved from hir­ing sea­son­al staff – usu­al­ly stu­dents – to key in all the data from the paper forms. “We had 20 tem­po­rary staff, like a typ­ing pool. Now there are two.” 

Accord­ing to Aubertin, per­haps the most sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion aside from cus­tomer expe­ri­ence has been in effi­cien­cy and flex­i­bil­i­ty. “It’s a great cost saver. We work with con­trac­tors who no longer have to come into the office. We can work much more effec­tive­ly using tools like Slack. When there are few­er of you there’s greater pres­sure, so you need to off­set that by giv­ing peo­ple the oppor­tu­ni­ty to work in a remote loca­tion.” 

While the pan­dem­ic may have forced peo­ple into a some­what unnat­ur­al exis­tence lived almost entire­ly online, Aubertin believes true dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion for Walk the Walk is man­ag­ing a more hybrid world. He says the organ­i­sa­tion is oper­at­ing both a phys­i­cal and vir­tu­al event this year. 

“Peo­ple want human inter­ac­tion. There’s an expec­ta­tion with dig­i­tal that you’re always going to be new. How do I cut through all that oth­er dig­i­tal noise? Con­stant rein­ven­tion is very dif­fi­cult and it’s expen­sive, so for us, phys­i­cal events is where we’re at.”

Aubertin notes that the speed of Walk the Walk’s dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion was very much influ­enced by wider user habits, such as “the idea of a more con­nect­ed world, the increase in the use of the inter­net, email becom­ing more than just a busi­ness tool and social media push­ing things along”. 

How­ev­er, the fundrais­ing tea par­ty is just as vital as a round robin email or YouTube video, he adds. He is also at pains to point out that for his busi­ness, social media is very much a shar­ing tool for donors. For a com­pa­ny of his size, the cost of engag­ing ful­ly with social media is too high. 

“Social media is incred­i­bly expen­sive. It sucked a lot of busi­ness­es in by being free but now they turn the sup­ply off unless you pay for it and there’s no cer­tain­ty you’ll get results. Social media is help­ful but for us, pick­ing up the tele­phone and talk­ing to our fundrais­ers is even more impor­tant.”

Big business transformation: delivering the ‘fourth emergency service’

The pan­dem­ic drove a mas­sive accel­er­a­tion for Boots UK “in terms of what we need­ed to do from a dig­i­tal per­spec­tive,” says ecom­merce direc­tor Paula Bob­bett.

Boots UK was one of the few high street retail­ers per­mit­ted to stay open through­out the pan­dem­ic. Still, lock­down forced a dra­mat­ic rethink of how it man­aged its dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal estate. “The lucky thing about being a huge busi­ness is you’ve got lots of stores, effec­tive­ly turn­ing them into micro-ful­fil­ment cen­tres and hybrid stores. That drove a real rethink about the role of the store,” Bob­bett says.

The pan­dem­ic accel­er­at­ed plans that were already in place. How­ev­er, it also revealed new ways of approach­ing not just dig­i­tal but omnichan­nel retail. Col­lect from store became an essen­tial tool dur­ing surge events such as Christ­mas and Black Fri­day, allow­ing the com­pa­ny to “flex up capac­i­ty”. 

It also trans­formed Boots UK’s role as an online busi­ness. “It’s fair to say online was under­in­vest­ed so the year of the pan­dem­ic was about both tripling sup­ply chain capac­i­ty and real­ly rethink­ing how we trade our web­site,” Bob­bett says. 

In its pre­vi­ous incar­na­tion, the online store fol­lowed phys­i­cal stores’ mer­chan­dis­ing plans, such as eight-week-long pro­mo­tions. How­ev­er, “that just doesn’t work in the dig­i­tal world because dig­i­tal busi­ness­es are about fear of miss­ing out, timed offers and dri­ving calls to action.”

As a result, ini­tia­tives such as a deliv­ery tri­al in part­ner­ship with Deliv­eroo meant the online pres­ence could ape the con­ve­nience of the phys­i­cal store, deliv­er­ing health­care essen­tials like headache tablets with­in 20 min­utes. “That proved real­ly pow­er­ful because sud­den­ly we’re more con­ve­nient than some of our dig­i­tal com­pe­ti­tion. We couldn’t do that with­out the strength of our stores.”

For Boots UK, dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion is less about ecom­merce and more about “how you bring the two togeth­er and how you lever­age the strength of tech­nol­o­gy across both your online plat­form but also in store,” Bob­bett says. “The next big thing for us is to effec­tive­ly mea­sure your store in the same way as you mea­sure your dig­i­tal busi­ness.”

If it sounds like a ‘click your fin­gers and it’s done’ moment, Bob­bett is the first to admit that becom­ing an agile, respon­sive omnichan­nel busi­ness is a work in progress, with Boots UK pick­ing ‘pock­ets’ where it can act as a start-up. 

“It’s hard­er as a big busi­ness to trans­form because you’re work­ing with a lot of lega­cy tech­nol­o­gy, you’re not buy­ing off the shelf and you’re hav­ing to adapt old sys­tems that aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly fit for dig­i­tal. But once you get the base­line right then you can real­ly accel­er­ate and become a lot more agile.”