If you live in the US, Canada, Germany, or the Philippines, or have visited these countries and eaten at a Chinese restaurant, you are most likely familiar with chop suey (or chopsuey). It’s a dish made up of a mixture of different vegetables (such as bean sprouts, carrots, cabbage, and celery) with some protein (any meat actually) and eggs, cooked quickly and usually goes in a starch-thickened sauce. In colloquial Filipino (the official language in the Philippines), “chop suey” is also used as an adjective, which loosely means “mixed.” Its actual usage, though, relates to the act of haphazardly and hastily throwing things together and calling it a day.
And this is where “Chop Suey Digital Strategy” comes in. As a business or technology leader of your company, you’ve probably been in this situation: you set out a digital transformation initiative that involves digitizing every department in your company. At the start, you probably set out to invest in a really expensive ERP (and you’re probably two or three years into the implementation and you’re still not fully done with it). Each department probably gave you a list of software that they would need for their operations and you’ve probably spent some considerable amount of effort integrating this software with each other. By now, you probably also have some form of a digital façade where people outside the organization (whether it’s your customers, vendors, or partners) have some way online for them to connect with people inside the organization. It could be in the form of a messaging app like Whatsapp or Viber or even Facebook Messenger, or some online form using Google Forms and the like, or maybe even a shared spreadsheet like an Excel file on Google Drive.
Congratulations, you have a Chop Suey Digital Strategy.
While these initial investments in time, money, and effort to implement some software to run your business are probably giving you some benefits – whether it’s higher employee productivity or happier customers, etc. – you are still faced with a big question: is this a reliable and scalable digital strategy? The short (and maybe painful) answer is NO.
The Problem with Chop Suey Digital Strategy
This patchwork style of digital transformation, where you have multiple point solutions that you try to connect together, is riddled with a lot of challenges. Firstly, having different software has multiple points of failure. When one system goes down, the rest can/will follow. Or one system changes or updates and the previously-established integration points get affected and the information flow breaks. Or maybe the system admin or accounting fails to pay one of your system’s subscription fees. All of this can bring your digital operations to a halt, which can mean a loss of business for your company even for a brief period of time.
One other big downside of a digital strategy involving cobbling together multiple software is oftentimes, your existing tools are incomplete. And you need to find another software that can do that feature that you need, increasing the complexity of your already-complex setup.
Lastly, the big problem with having a mish-mash of digital solutions is that subscribing to these different tools adds up and can be expensive in the long run. In addition to the subscription fees, maintaining these different tools can also be a business continuity if you face people in your IT team leaving and you’re unable to properly have other or new team members pick up the pieces.
Bringing It All Together with A Holistic Digital Transformation
Smart companies are now looking into how to create digital operations where stakeholders, activities, and even systems are all integrated into one place. This is drawing from our own experience of talking to numerous companies of all sizes from various industries. This is exactly why we think a solution like QuickReach can make a big difference. It addresses the challenges companies like you – who are middle-of-the-road in terms of digital maturity – face on a daily basis. With your initial investments in point, solutions have proven to be quite successful, you are now poised for growth, and it’s at this point that you are looking for ways to ensure reliability and scalability in your digital operations. Also, to drive greater efficiency and productivity within your organization, you simply need a better way to go digital.
QuickReach combines the best of digital workflows, forms, and records with task & process automation, integration automation/management, and no-code development to provide all the tools you need to create your digital enterprise. We built QuickReach drawing from over 20 years of creating custom software from the ground up, as well as more than 2 years of helping companies digitize, automate, and integrate business processes.
What makes using QuickReach ideal for holistic digital transformation can be summed up in three points:
Geared for Growth
With QuickReach, you can start small and scale as needed. This applies both to how the solutions built in it can work (its microservice architecture can handle thousands of users) and also to the commercial aspect of it (you pay by the number of users or by usage). As processes also grow more complex, you can also increase the number of automation you build inside QuickReach – enabling you to cater to bigger demands from your stakeholders.
Fosters Agility
QuickReach’s solutions are built through easy drag-and-drop with no coding required. This enables your company (even your business users) to tweak solutions as you learn more from the end-user's feedback, versus full-code software that may be difficult or expensive to reconfigure/improve. This also empowers the IT team to offload some of the solution-building work and focus on high-priority items by engaging other employees to actually build their solutions themselves. All you need is to have a good working knowledge of how software is
configured, and we have a comprehensive knowledge base and self-learning academy to guide anyone every step of the way.
Everything is Connected
What makes QuickReach special is its ability to bring activities/workflows, stakeholders, and systems together. No more dealing with siloed software bought for certain departments. A multi-stakeholder (internal or external) or multi-department process can be easily configured inside QuickReach. You have full control of what each user sees and what they can do, but one thing is for sure: all pertinent information is shared with the right stakeholder in real-time. This means you not only put an end to paperwork, but you also put an end to guesswork because there’s unbeatable visibility for everyone – anytime, anywhere, and on any device (whether on a mobile phone, a tablet, a laptop, or desktop). And lastly, integrating other systems into QuickReach is a breeze. You don’t have to let go of your initial investments and in fact, you can maximize them with QuickReach in place.
Other than the product’s many capabilities, QuickReach also offers Go Digital Services such as admin and end-user training, data migration, and solution configuration. Through its sister brand Xamun, we can even help you build an even more complex custom software in weeks and connect it back to QuickReach as needed.
It’s time to turn around your “Chop Suey Digital Strategy” and bring in a robust platform that will support your digital operations. To know more about QuickReach, you can book a solutioning meeting with our team where we will study your digital strategy and propose a better way to go about it with QuickReach. Follow us on LinkedIn or Facebook as well to get the latest updates in digital transformation and on our product.
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