Every business has opportunities to digitise. Every company has areas where they can unlock extra efficiency. Areas where they can remove frustrating pain points. Areas where they can enhance the experience for their employees and customers alike. The question is how do you find them?
In this article, we explore how you can pinpoint the biggest opportunities for your business with scientific accuracy.
Every business on the planet right now is under pressure to deliver the right results. Every business is under pressure to engage employees and delight customers. To achieve this, you have to streamline your operations from top to bottom. You need to enhance your customer experience and drive efficiency across the board.
Why? Because keeping pace isn’t enough. It’s the companies that successfully adopt digital solutions that will pull ahead from the pack with a competitive advantage.
Every business has opportunities to digitise. But successful digital transformation? That only comes from identifying the right solutions – solutions that are actually going to move the needle for your business. Just as important, successful digital transformation requires you to put the right technology at the centre of everything not on the periphery.
At Sonin App Development, this is our bread and butter. We specialise in results-driven digital products that move the needle for our clients – clients from a cross-section of different industries. Our focus is and always has been on developing solutions that meet the specific needs of your business, helping you increase efficiency, cut costs, and deliver value to your users.
With the right tech partner like Sonin, you can zero in on what that solution is. Because whether you’re looking to make money or save it, building the right app and the right software is the best way to achieve it.
The Warning Signs You Need to Watch
Sometimes, it’s obvious when and where your business has to digitise. In many cases, though, the signs are more subtle and hard to spot. You have to learn to look for the warning signs. There are internal and external indicators that signal something isn’t working as well as it should be.
The better you are at monitoring these warning signs, the earlier and more often you can spot opportunities to digitise. The earlier and more often you spot opportunities to digitise, the faster you can create competitive advantages that drive the business results you need.
Internal Indicators
| Identify repetitive tasks |
| Review customer touchpoints |
| Spot bottlenecks |
When looking for opportunities to digitise, you should always start by looking internally. Identify your most repetitive tasks. The tasks that involve manual data entry, outdated systems, or slow processes. These are often where the biggest and easiest opportunities to digitise are found and where quick wins can be made.
You also need to pay attention to your customer touchpoints. Order processing, communications, and customer support. If any steps here feel clunky or uncoordinated, then they’re likely harming your customer satisfaction and losing you money.
Bottlenecks are clear signs that change is needed. If you or your team keep asking, “Why can’t this be done faster?” then there’s your warning sign. These inefficiencies block growth, wasting time and draining your team’s energy, preventing focus on high-value tasks.
It’s outdated operations and bottlenecks that will slow you down. They make you sluggish while competitors and new entrants make ground at a rapid rate. SHEIN has grown to be a 100$ billion company by leveraging a digital-first supply chain that connects customers’ in-app shopping behaviour seamlessly with factories for smart, on-demand manufacturing.
The right digital solution will speed things up, improve accuracy, and improve your return on investment.
External Indicators
| Review your competitors |
| Listen to your customers |
With a clear picture of the internal areas where you can improve, you can then look at the external. First, review your competitive landscape. Are others offering a smoother customer experience? An experience that’s faster and smarter? How do they communicate with customers?
If your competition is pulling ahead, then in today’s world it’s likely they’re embracing the right digital products with the right mindset. Falling behind here isn’t an option. The longer you wait to do the same, the more ground you’ll lose.
Don’t forget to listen to your customers, either. Complaints about slow service or clunky processes point to areas in need of digital transformation. Customer expectations are rising fast, and if your business doesn’t meet or exceed them, they’ll move on.
Take the taxi industry as an example. Traditional taxi companies had a monopoly until they didn’t. They were slow to adopt a digital-first approach. They avoided apps and booking system software. Then along came Uber and the rest is history.
If your competitors are winning, customers are frustrated, or new tech is changing your industry, then now is the time to act – before it’s too late.
Prioritise the Biggest Opportunities to Digitise
Once you have a clear picture of the internal and external warning signs, the next step is figuring out where to start and which ones to tackle first.
Not every warning sign is critical to the success of your business. Not every process needs to be digitised straight away. So, how do you prioritise the biggest opportunities? The opportunities that are going to have the most impact on the business results you want to see?
Start with Business Process Mapping. This will give you a detailed look at your operations. Both the areas where you’re delighting customers and where you’re falling short. It highlights where digitisation will add the most value.
Next, use Impact/Effort Mapping. Weigh up how much work each opportunity will require compared with the value it will create for your business, your employees, and your customers. Focus on the areas with the highest return on technology investment, whether that’s improving efficiency, cutting costs, or boosting customer experience.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you must have a process in place to test new ideas quickly and with minimal risk. Prototypes, pilots, or A/B testing allow you to see what works before committing fully, letting you adapt without major disruption.
Prioritising your digital opportunities shouldn’t be about checking boxes. It should be about being smart with your resources and creating the most value for your business and customers.
Doing this from scratch isn’t easy. Working with a tech partner like Sonin App Development stops you from spending time and money to learn the lessons we’ve already learnt from over 15 years of experience.
That way, you can focus on the digital strategy behind your solution while our team of digital product strategists, UK app developers, and UX designers work with you to build and refine it.
Quickfire Industry Examples
Different industries offer different opportunities to digitise. In this next section, we look at some of the key areas where the right digital product can create an impact fast.
Property & Real Estate
Digitising billing processes in property and real estate is a game-changer. Automatic, seamless transactions make rent collections more reliable and reduce the risk of late or missed payments from your tenants. Not only this, but it also frees up time for your property managers to focus on important tasks – not chasing down invoices.
On top of that, there are many manual tasks involved in property project management that can be replaced with digital tools. Take site discovery, for example. There’s so much paperwork and legwork that goes into finding the right site to develop. The information you need is often siloed across different resources and parties.
That’s why LandTech – the UK’s fastest-growing PropTech company – approached Sonin App Development to help understand the biggest opportunities where a mobile app could support and accelerate the sourcing and financing of property projects.
The bespoke property app, which is tailor-made for property professionals on the go, helps users track progress in real-time, ensuring their projects stay on schedule and within budget. This solution improved Time to Value by 65%, reduced the average Time to Complete KPI by 18%, and is used by more than one in five users of the web app.
Logistics
In the Logistics industry, digitising your fleet is a no-brainer. Automated systems allow you to track the location and performance of every single vehicle in your fleet. On top of this, you can also monitor fuel usage in real-time and plan and schedule maintenance much more efficiently. All this leads to reduced downtime and better overall fleet health.
Supply chain monitoring is another key opportunity to digitise. With the right solution, businesses get a clear view of their entire supply chain from start-to-finish including the last mile. Being able to spot potential disruptions before they become costly problems not only improves delivery times but also ensures better customer satisfaction.
This is why DS Smith – a leading provider of sustainability and recycling services – approached Sonin App Development. They wanted a connected supply chain that would connect their thousands of staff and contractors with customers for full visibility throughout. To do this, we interviewed a cross-section of in-house employees, contractors, and customers to identify which opportunities would have the biggest impact on DS Smith’s bottom line and its customer experience.
Healthcare
In healthcare, digital booking systems streamline appointment management and reduce the amount of admin work needed. AI-powered note-taking apps and similar tools allow professionals to focus on providing patients with the support they need. Processing paperwork becomes faster with digital forms, cutting down on manual entry and speeding up claims. And all the while, ensuring accurate and accessible records.
Nursdoc – one of the leading healthcare recruitment companies in the UK – processes thousands of timesheets every week for employees all around the country. Manually processing these timesheets took time away from more important tasks and involved a higher margin of error than a digital system.
That’s why Nursdoc approached Sonin App Development to help understand where the biggest opportunities to digitise were. Together, we built a bespoke healthcare platform that would be able to process the high volume of timesheets – improving visibility, efficiency, and productivity for the entire team.
Caterpillar: An Example of Spotting the Opportunity to Digitalise
Caterpillar is the world’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment. They support customers and partners of all sizes in the construction industry.
On construction sites, tools and supplies go missing all the time. They’re stolen and they’re damaged every single day. This doesn’t just cost the company money, it causes projects to grind to a halt.
Why? Because workers have to either spend their time tracking these tools down or sourcing and collecting their replacements at short notice at significant cost. This has a huge impact on the efficiency of every project. It leads to longer timelines and larger insurance premiums that eat into the bottom line.
Managers wanted to run job sites more efficiently and construction workers wanted to know where their tools were. Caterpillar knew there was an opportunity to digitise but wasn’t sure how to find it. That’s why they approached Sonin App Development.
The solution, built for CAT’s custom hardware, provides complete visibility into every site and the tools, assets and supplies. Users can register and track all their tools which are visible in real time to site managers. Automatic alerts warn users when these tools are taken off-site thanks to geofenced areas.
The Caterpillar app greatly reduces the amount of paperwork on sites where it’s used while also increasing visibility and driving operational efficiency.