A lot has been said about digital transformation and many people don’t understand how the process is or if any company can go through this transformation.

The answer is quite simple, yes every company that believes in digital transformation can start to have good practices and start the digital process in their teams.

In retail it would be no different, even though it is a vast market, it is possible to improve your deliveries, work more quickly and even increase your company’s results with the digital transformation.

This article is based on an interview with Agile.Inc CEO, Ivan Santos for the “Varejo Vivo” YouTube channel. You can watch the full interview here

 

Is it correct to say that we live in the digital age?

Yes, absolutely. We have been living the Digital Era for a while and, with the pandemic, this only served to make us reflect more and more on the need for other optimization channels in the service companies have with their customers.

Nowadays we live in a very digital world, very different from what we lived in  about 10 years ago and we already knew that a big change was coming.

 

Why work with agility?

Agility is the new way of thinking, structuring and reflecting on how to improve your workflow. Thinking back when people used a lot of kanban, lean etc, it is doubtful that if with agility this would be thrown away. And the answer is no!

In today’s digital world, response time is much shorter than time to market, so you MUST improve your methodologies with the help of agile practices. Agility is the lever for companies to generate new value for their customers.

Agility will help you and take whatever practice you already use, understand the moment you are is and with agile practices you can deliver the best product to the most suitable audience.

For example, your company has just developed a product and it hasn’t had the expected effect on the audience, this is where agile practices and digital transformation will help you to achieve this see these challenges before launching any product or service

 

Agility x Efficiency 

I would say that Agility will bring a lot of efficiency and transparency to companies. There are traditional companies that invest in startups and are sure that they really know what is going on in the management of these companies.

And after putting the digital transformation project into practice, they were able to see, in a short time of execution, the transparency in all the work management that they didn’t have before and with that improve their strategies across all teams in the organization.

For traditional companies, transparency is usually much more hidden and when they start implementing agility, it is possible to clearly see how the company improves its processes and deliveries.

When we talk about agility, we talk about delivering value.

Often we feel that we are meeting the needs of our customers and we end up investing in something that at the moment should not be a priority. That’s why it’s more than important to collect Feedback, it’s essential so that the team can inspect and adapt for the team to move towards the organization’s objective.

 

How can Agile.Inc make the digital transformation in retail?

• Consulting

 We help companies to be able to identify the main projects and how to execute them in an agile way to digitize their channels.

 

• Make the delivery  4 hands:

When it comes to digital transformation, we have a multidisciplinary team that works directly with the client to create a new channel, product or service.

 

• Awareness

Understand where the company is and help with mindset changes and improve together with the customers products and services with better quality. potential results.

 

Besides e-commerce, how to understand digital retail? 

It is common to think that digital transformation is only for technology companies, but there are companies that use agility to do all their strategic planning, develop their portfolio and manage projects.

There are companies in the agricultural segment that use agility to optimize their processes and obtain better results with their own customers. So not only e-commerce, applications and any other technology or startup is necessarily digital.

Today there are companies that operate in areas that are not technology and that are adopting agile and digital transformation as a great lever to leverage their business in order to sell themselves in the market and make new investments, create new products or improve existing services.

 

What can Agile.Inc offer to supermarkets?

The first step is to identify the real situation and main areas of expertise. In most markets there is Data Driven, which is data oriented to decision making, so let’s identify which products and behaviors can be created to improve the results of this market.

By working with multidisciplinary teams, with a more strategic vision such as aspirations and purposes, agility brings this type of benefit and can create new products.

It is important to transform the company’s culture and strategy so that it is not only reactive, but also able to explore opportunities with existing products.

 

How to propose digital transformation for family businesses?

This is the challenge we like because normally these companies already think they do things in an Agile way.

There is the story of the J, that when splitting they leave only his curve, we call this small curve the resistance curve and it is this that needs to be broken for traditional companies and family members can become agile.

There have been situations in which we were in training and the client commented that they were taking the course because the company director returned from abroad and imposed that everyone would be agile. And that’s not how it works.

Agile is the medium. And to overcome this resistance curve there are data and facts, they are clear and achievable goals. It starts with small practices, take an initiative, work very well what are the success criteria with this you start to monitor the issues that you brought to this initiative. Based on the results of this test, you improve your practices and action plans and, with that, increase the results.

Being agile means raising awareness and realizing the real need, generating value for your customer. Agility has to be the means based on small experiments.

To convince a company, you just need to show results. Let’s get a little piece that can make a different result and then we’ll install the rest

 

How can I converge the purpose of being agile with the premise of putting the customer at the center?

It is important for you as a company to identify what it means to be agile for you, based on that we will work with digital transformation strategies so that your customer is a priority for your company.

We often create products with the pains of our customers, right? Therefore, the customer at the edge is the main model for working with agility. Therefore, improving the customer experience, growing digitally will be possible

 

How do traditional companies transform themselves digitally and how do they manage to change their culture without competing with other companies that have already come out ahead?

A lot of people talk about innovation, but innovation doesn’t only come with new technologies or contributions, it can also come from your daily life and culture.

There are several companies that were bought for 200,300 million reais because the investor saw in it a culture that he would like to implement in his organization and that with the acquisition it will become “easy ”Of course this is part of more strategic planning.

So when we look at retail as a whole, how do we manage to integrate it all? And the digital transformation has been increasingly helping the companies to understand from a strategic point of view where to step into the market.

 

The cultural issue is always weighty, how does Agile.Inc act on the issue of culture?

I would say that culture is observed even when the person is not in the company. For example, here at Agile.Inc they are interested in working here because people identify that in the company they will be able to increase their mastery, as they also see Agile.Inc as one of the best companies in the Agility market.

And then when I talk about culture, in the selection process, the person already knows, he is already attracted. And the candidate understands that working at agiel will contribute to professional appreciation and recognition.

So there are some aspects that we start to work on in the organization’s culture: how do I hire? How do I retain these professionals and let them develop?
Culture will permeate all of this. So when you make this vision very clear, the work that will exist behind it so that this same culture remains and is followed will be very strong

 

What is Agile’s recommendation for companies that operate in the traditional retail model?

Try it out! So create experimentation scenarios with a good purpose and clear objective and metric all the results of those tests.

Be open to new technologies, new ways of thinking. Identify companies that are doing differently and understand what is driving these actions.

Perform a benchmarking of your company, understand what is happening in each sector, what needs to be improved. A survey showed that 90% of initiatives within companies already work with agility

Businesses are leaving the traditional way! We have reached a time when a startup is worth more than Petrobras with all those millionaire assets that exist. So what is going on?

Of course, there is a whole question of knowledge of insights to be generated. We live in a new economy and based on this new economy, companies value themselves. If you observe and have an opening to readapt and do small experiments, you will certainly have different results.

Maybe it’s time to be open to new opportunities.

 

In this moment of pandemic what has changed in the performance of Agile.Inc? And what is the perspective for 2021 post-vaccination?

We have several large clients in the organization and several of them delivering buildings who have realized that the work and the result happen whether or not the employee is present in the office..

I, Ivan, am a big believer in hybrid work within clients and with clients in their daily lives. And when I say hybrid I’m not saying 3 days a week at work and 2 at home, that’s not it.

What I’m saying is that this engineering of belonging to the company, people getting together for coffee, will continue to exist, in a smaller proportion of course. However, the Pandemic only came to show what was happening before, this issue of remote work was already something being worked on before in some companies.

Agile.Inc is coming back very well prepared to be supporting its customers on how to work remotely

And looking at the perspective for 2021, I believe this format will continue, I don’t believe it will change even because of actions that big customers and other big companies have been taking.

We see in the headlines that more and more companies are innovating and increasingly looking for ways to create products that customers can really love, really meet their needs, their pains.

We help retail and multi-segment companies to accelerate the Digital Transformation, if you want to know more about this subject please contact us over here .