As the threat of recession looms over the UK economy, many organisations are facing the challenge of how to remain profitable at a time where austerity is striking many of their key customers and revenue streams. With the UK GDP growth averaging between 2.8% - 3.8% growth, significantly lower than predicted, organisations from all sectors are set to suffer. Many organisations are struggling to weather the storm of price increases they are currently facing. With unprecedented supply chain shocks, labour shortages and inflation, business owners are having to quickly adapt their businesses and reconcile which economic conditions are transitory and which are permanent.
The Russian invasion of the Ukraine has led to a sharp rise in commodity prices, as oil, gas, food and other raw material prices shot up due to supply disruption and ongoing government sanctions. This has exacerbated global shortage of some tradable goods. Supply chains have then been disrupted further as the COVID-19 crisis has peaked again in China, with Chinese authorities imposing strict restrictions across several Chinese cities. Leading organisations are utilising intelligent workflows to integrate proven business process transformation methodologies and emerging technologies, such as advanced analytics, AI and blockchain to create a smarter supply chain.
Intelligent workflows increase process efficiencies to make your supply chain more agile, transparent and responsive for employees and customers. This will drive resiliency, agility and predictability by reducing operational silos and enabling them to respond quickly to market disruptions, mitigate risk and maintain business continuity.
As the UK emerges from the pandemic, the affects this has had on how people live, work and shop are still resounding through the business world, with many organisations still scrambling to react to this change in consumer and employee behaviour. The process of globalisation had already shrunk any concept of physical distance to almost negligible levels, and the ramifications of COVID-19 will only reinforce this long term. More people will be conducting more of their personal and professional lives online and remotely and so businesses must adapt to this trend.
The ’Great Resignation’ of 2021, saw a mass shake-up of the employment landscape with more workers resigning from current roles to move onto new ones which better met the job expectations. Attrition rates rose to 20 – 30 per cent across some sectors, a trend which is continuing in 2022, with the highest rate of staff turnover occurring in the lower-paid positions. Record numbers of unfilled jobs are likely to limit higher productivity and growth in 2022, as Deloitte estimate a shortfall of 2.1 million skilled jobs by 2030.
To attract and retain talent, organisations should pair strategies such as reskilling with a recasting of their employment brand to attract new talent into their industry. Engagement with a wider talent ecosystem of partners to reach diverse, skilled talent pools can help offset the recent wave of retirements and voluntary exits.
Flexible working has taken root, with staff who had a taste of remote working during the pandemic expecting employers to continue offering more flexibility in their working options. The workforce overall will continue to become more fluid and unpredictable, putting more pressure on the ability of less “hybrid-ready” companies to staff and run their operations.
The employee shortage is also being compounded by a growing skills gap. Organisations are utilising IT innovations to enhance their working models and increase productivity which is triggering a requirement for new technical, digital and professional skills. However, these are proving hard to come by in today’s UK workforce, within which the UK Commission for Employment and Skills reports a 43% shortage of STEM skills. This greater competition for talent is limiting many organisations’ ability to evolve, grow and adopt new technologies.
However, investing in technology such as Robotic Process Automation or AI can help drive employee satisfaction by freeing employees from monotonous tasks to allow them more opportunities to upskill and take on higher value work. Technology Adoption will play a key role in empowering employees, attracting new talent, filling skills gaps as they arise, and enabling new hybrid workflows.
Today, we find ourselves living the reality of a cyber everywhere world where digital transformation initiatives continue to accelerate amid the emergence of a pervasive remote workforce.
The COVID-19 pandemic challenged organisations to rapidly transform their work environments, often with little to no time to consider the security implications of the IT being deployed. The risks of this rapid change are being exacerbated as many organisations suffer from legacy infrastructure and technical debt; this array of technologies combining on-premise infrastructure with hybrid IT and Cloud infrastructure, is limiting organisations visibility of their organisations threat landscape. Addressing these security vulnerabilities is impossible without significant investment and transformation. The benefits of hybrid working becoming the ‘norm’, are countered by this increased risk that it is exposing organisations and their sensitive data to.
Despite the increased risks, digital transformation is key to organisations improving efficiency and becoming more reactive to change. Embracing IT innovations and data digitisation allows data to flow across organisations in new ways, creating value by connecting lines of business and customer data to produce comprehensive insights which can lead to business improvement.
As digitisation, connectivity and IoT devices start to proliferate, and as IT and supply-chain systems become more integrated, networks will become more complex and therefore exposed to increased cyber threat. To secure their IP and proprietary data, as well as protect against significant breach fines organisations must invest in advanced cyber security solutions and a Zero Trust architecture to ensure operational resilience.
Business relationships with both customers and suppliers are continually changing, but the technologies that support those relationships are being developed and deployed at an ever-increasing pace.
Cloud technologies are now ubiquitous within almost all commercial organisations, whether public, private, or a hybrid of the two, and many business-as-usual activities can be effectively and efficiently provided by a cloud service. Additionally, process automation is becoming more accepted, enabling organisations to focus their skills and resources into the value added areas of their business that give them the highest levels of commercial differentiation.
New and innovative technologies are becoming deployed into commercial businesses in increasingly shorter timeframes. For example, AI is already being deployed at scale within the financial, logistics and media industries, where automating tasks frees up resources so that organisations can provide more bespoke and personal services to their customers. IoT, 5G, data analytics, computer vision, augmented reality and more will add to this canon of technologies that will become commonplace within the next decade. It is now essential for any commercial organisation to understand any new technologies and rapidly commence agile adoption where potential benefits can be foreseen.
Many new and innovative technologies can combine to provide higher levels of customer experience. The ability to integrate them will enable the provision of almost real-time insights into the performance of an organisation’s supply chain and their interactions with their customer base. This will enable organisations to respond to changing customer demands and trends with greater agility, retaining existing customers through an improved service experience whilst attracting many more by providing what customers want, as they want it.
Businesses must play their part in global efforts to address climate change, halt biodiversity loss and to respond to other social and environmental challenges. Sustainability pressures are mounting, not just from the government net zero targets but also from customers, who are rapidly starting to include sustainability and the environment effect of starting to include sustainability and the environment effect of products and services into their purchase decisions.
This is challenging organisations to step up their sustainability agendas, to match consumer attitude changes and achieve net zero for greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the government 2050 timeline. To achieve these goals an immediate, rapid and largescale reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is needed. A transition that cannot take place without a significant shift of investment into sustainable projects and green technology.
To reach or exceed the net zero deadline, organisations must harness the power of technology and embrace digital disruption to amplify and accelerate their sustainability strategies. The appetite for increasingly sophisticated technology to reduce carbon emissions is there, as well as for facilitating the changes needed to create a sustainable infrastructure, with business leaders keen to capitalise with more intensive use of Robotic Process Automation, machine learning, ‘digital twin’, data analytics and AI technologies.
From supporting in-house upskilling, mapping out the risks and benefits of sustainable strategies and creating a resilient supply chain, to enabling decarbonisation by monitoring and measuring emissions, technology helps companies to take control of their environmental initiatives by offering comprehensive and automated insights.