How to prepare a business for digital transformation

Should Business Processes Be Optimized in Advance

So how do you effectively prepare for B2B portal development? In this article, we will look at all of these issues, and I will propose the action plan that, based on our experience, saves IT management from a huge number of problems. A B2B portal and a B2B marketplace are online platforms for wholesale buyers.

Example

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Suppose one of the company's executives in a remote region learned that the market leader in his industry had built a B2B portal. That inspired him, he became enthusiastic, and he wanted to do the same: digitize all interactions with his wholesale customers. But right now, the business processes in his company are completely not automated. Orders are placed by phone, shipments are processed manually, and approval of a paper printout of an order takes two weeks.

Most market players in his region do it that way, and his customers consider it normal and even convenient. Why does he need digitalization, and more importantly, how should he approach working with a contractor so it does not become painfully difficult later? Should he invest large sums in an IT product for the sake of the product itself? But then how should development success be measured - would the evaluation scale really have only two values ("Done" or "Not done")?

When a client wants to build a B2B portal but does not have a clearly defined purpose for it, it is worth working on goal setting using the Impact Mapping method. I wrote about this in more detail in the article "Impact Mapping, Unit Economics, and PDCA: Effective e-Commerce Development Management." Impact Mapping helps define project goals clearly in line with the goals of the entire business. To do this, you need to perform a deep analysis and answer four key questions.

We follow agile development management approaches and believe that before building complex software, you should first create an MVP, test it with real users, and only then refine it and add improvements. A specification is a waste of time and money, and the information in it becomes outdated while it is still being written. While the client is writing the specification, some people may leave, much may change in the business, and your own vision of the ideal may become completely different.

As a result, a few months later you receive a request to test all the functionality, but there is no guarantee you even remember how it is supposed to work.

All these details are not obvious at the start of a project - they will be identified, clarified, and improved only after the MVP is released, through real interaction between the IT product and the end user. As a result, the developers made the necessary changes and improvements revealed by real feedback, not by someone's outdated hypotheses fixed in the specification. After launch, the portal received a high NPS from users (Net Promoter Score).

In this case, both the team and the client clearly saw what losses an MVP helps avoid and how important it is to get fast feedback on the product.

- higher order frequency (think about yourself - you probably also buy more often from the online store and order taxis more often in the app where forms are autofilled and your card is already linked.

B2B purchases are also made by people, not robots, and under otherwise equal conditions they prefer a fast and easy order); - optimizing order structure (the seller can stimulate demand for products in a way that benefits them: people often order what the system recommends rather than what they are used to ordering); - increasing profit through additional services (tender support, financial services, legal services, etc.).