Digitizing your Business: when is the right time and which tools should you use

Automatically translated based on the transcript of the film in Polish:

Introduction – why old tools slow down business

Is your company still based on Excel and Word? Do you feel that new technologies are changing the market faster than you can keep up with, and that the train has already left long ago? You are not alone. Only 21% of Polish enterprises have reached a high level of digitization, and nearly 1.3 million still do not use any modern tools. That is why in this episode I will show you when you absolutely need to change your approach, why entrepreneurs are increasingly turning to digitization,

which solutions work best, and how to implement them without incurring high costs and without a revolution.

Hi, my name is Kamil Tarczyński and on a daily basis I help entrepreneurs use technology more effectively so that their companies run smoothly and grow faster. Today we are going to talk about digitization. To start, we will begin with the problem: why old tools slow down our business. At the beginning, in a company, simple tools like Excel, Word, Outlook, etc. are completely sufficient to run the company. All sales, marketing, and service processes for serving your clients can be handled with these tools.

In most cases—maybe not in every single one, but definitely in most—it can be done this way. Nevertheless, when your company grows, when the company you work for grows, becomes bigger, serves more and more clients, hires more employees, you begin to create small chaos.

Things that until now took one or two days begin to take a week. Generating reports is sometimes incomplete. The flow of information between departments, employees, or clients becomes very chaotic. Clients begin to complain that they do not get certain information on time or that the information is incomplete. Each department, de facto, has its own version of events, files, and so on.

Increasing manual work and business risk

And de facto we also start to notice that although we are hiring more people, more employees, serving more clients, everything begins to slow down, because there is simply more and more manual work. We add some new procedures, which are supposed to fix the fact that something is running slower, that something got lost somewhere, but in fact we are only adding work to the same number of employees, and this is 100%

manual work. Therefore, at this point, it is not only inconvenient for everyone involved in these processes, but de facto it creates risk, and serious business risk. A 2024 report from the Polish Development Fund indicates that only 21% of Polish companies have reached a high level of digitization. The data are shocking. This means that almost 80% of companies

are still not highly digitized, still rely to a large extent on paper data, manual work, and so on and so forth. And today we will talk about how we can gain a competitive advantage precisely thanks to this digitization. And now let’s ask ourselves the question: when is it worth thinking about change, or when is it worth thinking about starting this digital path or digital evolution. There are at least several signals…

they overlap a bit with what I said earlier. That is, we can list things like slowing down of work...

we are serving the same number of clients, we are adding more people, but work is not going any faster, our capacity—that is, the availability of employees, their readiness to take on further projects—does not grow exponentially, it does not grow along with the hiring of more people, it remains more or less in the same place. Data gets lost, communication with clients is lost. At this point, too, we know that something is not working. We do not have unified communication channels, we do not have one place,

Warning signals: inconsistency and delays

really from which our employees or clients can draw data or information about what we are doing for them, or what still, de facto,

remains to be done, what we require from them, and so on. Between departments, conflicts begin to appear. One department says that another required them to do something. The other department says it never had such information. And again, here we come back to the problem of lacking consistency in the flow of information. Generating or delivering services begins to take more time. Clients start complaining that things are constantly being postponed. Again, this is for us

a clear signal that something is not right. And we have to ask ourselves clearly whether there is some potential here for automation, to relieve our employees, because we simply gave them additional tasks, additional duties that they have to perform around procedures, or whether at some other level something here is not working. Departments use different systems. We do not have one consistent place from which we draw information—for example about the client pipeline.

about what stage a project is at, right? We all have to question each other—one department has to ask another, then a third, and so on—about what stage the execution is at. Again, this means that either the department does not have access to the right information in our system, or, de facto, we do not have one system, but everyone uses a different one. We do not want to pay for additional licenses, but de facto this makes execution of our services harder, not easier.

If service costs are rising and efficiency is not increasing, then this is also a clear sign that something is obviously wrong. And these are, in my opinion, very clear signals in which we have to say to ourselves: OK. This is exactly the time when we need to start taking some steps toward digital evolution, so that all this data can somehow be unified, automated, processed. And here I will tell you what we have available…

Approach: step-by-step evolution and available tools

tools, or possibilities to carry out such a digital evolution. The good news is that we do not have to immediately invest huge amounts of money to carry out this evolution. At present we have available very many ways or tools that can help us do it, in fact going step by step. That is, again, we are not making a great revolution, rather we are focusing on evolution—putting out the biggest fires,

right? Automating where we have the narrowest bottlenecks, unclogging them, and step by step improving our company. So what are these tools? What are these possibilities? The first and most obvious one is automation. Currently Deloitte estimates that automation can improve and speed up the work of employees or our teams by as much as 20 to 30 percent. That is a gigantic number.

On the scale of enterprises, sometimes it means savings of hundreds of hours per month, which we can easily calculate ourselves—what this means for the enterprise or for our department. And what is this automation? Automation, of course, is intended to automate certain processes that until now were done manually.

If we have systems in which our employees work, very often they allow integration with other systems through various programming interfaces, so that with some triggers—that is, there is some trigger, for example an email arrives, someone creates a task somewhere—this can trigger a series of actions, a whole procedure that will execute one after another to deliver some result, which we will later be able to present to the client,

or deliver to another department to perform the necessary work. Another type of tool that is very often used in companies and helps to automate, especially in sales or execution departments, is CRM, that is, Client Relationship Management. It is a platform, a type of platform, that helps us manage relationships with clients.

CRM and Business Intelligence (BI)

to see what stage they are at, when the last calls or some contact with the client took place, to store information about projects we have done for them, or about contact, and so on and so forth. It simply helps us manage relationships with clients. Another tool that is already worth implementing in somewhat larger enterprises is certainly Business Intelligence, that is, a tool that analyzes our data from different sources

and allows us on this basis to draw certain conclusions,

to analyze certain information, whether financial or service-related, concerning utilization of our employees, their availability, and so on, in order to correlate different sources with different data, so as to learn exactly what is happening in our company—whether the projects we are implementing are profitable, whether, for example, all our employees are working in the same way, are equally effective, in what time intervals or in what average time certain solutions are being delivered to our clients.

This simply allows us to better understand what is really happening in our company and what is going on beneath the surface. If, however, we saw that the tools we use, the ones we have purchased, are not sufficient—that our processes are very specific, require specific services, some tailor-made solutions—then again, we do not have to implement software in the traditional way now. We can very often easily build software for our company

using No-Code or Low-Code tools. No-Code/Low-Code is a technology that allows us to build applications from ready-made, predefined elements, with user interfaces, with certain server-side workflows—that is, it allows us to build tools such as a CRM, etc., that will automate the functioning of our company or improve its functioning. Of course, I think it is also worth mentioning here AI.

The role of AI and automation – accessibility and implementation

which has been developing very strongly in recent years and which also helps us automate certain processes, generate various data that until now were not possible. But AI also speeds up the very development of applications, so if you ever thought that you needed more applications, tailor-made, then at this moment it is the best time to create them, because such large budgets as were needed a few years ago are no longer required. I think that at this point it is worth focusing on two…

that can give the fastest, greatest effects, and that can, de facto, be applied in any company. These will of course be automation and AI. AI is today really available to everyone, just like automation, because very many business platforms already provide them built into themselves. And what do I mean by that? I do not mean solutions that help us summarize text

with the help of AI. I mean more platforms that allow us to implement AI into our processes, or that allow us to implement automation inside our IT environment. I mean, for example, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, the use of programming interfaces from ChatGPT,

automations done using traditional methods, that is simply through programming, which can then interact with practically every single source of information that we have in our company. And de facto, precisely because these are already very popular solutions, their implementation does not have to be very time-consuming and very expensive, it can be carried out quite efficiently, plus we do not have to immediately pay some high fees for…

Examples: generating reports and marketing content

when we were generating financial reports, which always looked the same, had a consistent structure, had to contain some information that we obtain from different sources, then AI is great here at generating such reports for our employees. Because AI perfectly understands the structure of this document, perfectly understands what is supposed to be in it, is able to retrieve the information, arrange it, if we provide it with examples of previous executions. Thanks to this, if…

generating such reports until now took one employee several hours, then AI will be able to generate such a report in a dozen or so minutes, and we have already done such implementations. Generating marketing content—you run a blog, you want to create campaigns or anything else—AI is great here to help generate this type of content, generate some ideas that will be a great starting point to even start a discussion.

Applications of AI in recruitment, sales, and customer service

analysis of CVs in recruitment. Very many programs already have built-in CV analyzers. We can ourselves build automations that will analyze them in the way that we require, that we want, thanks to which again we will be able to filter out certain employee applications in such a way that simply our recruitment department will be able to save its time and analyze CVs that, de facto, are not at all matched to a given job posting.

prediction of best-selling products, or handling sales departments or customer service departments in general—that is another great example of automation implementation with the support of AI.

That is, for example, we have a customer service department that receives complaints, receives various inquiries. And very often these inquiries are incomplete, complaint reports are also incomplete. AI can immediately classify such information, send back a request to complete the information if it is incomplete, or categorize it, suggest a response to the consultant, and also forward such a query to the appropriate consultant, thanks to which we will streamline the customer service department

and ensure that it does not have those bottlenecks. And what do we, as a company, de facto gain after implementing all this? First of all, we gain time. The priceless time of our employees,

who, by handing over these boring, repetitive tasks, automating them, will be able to focus more on our clients or on the quality of what they do. They will not have to once again arrange these repetitive things, but will be able to put in that human element I spoke about earlier, to add business value to our clients or to the solutions we build. We gain data certainty. If we have one source of data that is consistent, visible to everyone,

Benefits: time, data certainty, savings, scalability, advantage

then we avoid the risk that they will be inconsistent, not updated, incomplete, that someone will have to question others about things that, de facto, they could have at their fingertips. Savings. Automations, if they save our employees’ time, save us money.

Because automations of course cost money, their use is not free, because it requires computing power, a server, some platforms. Nevertheless, the data clearly indicate that the balance is positive for us—that is, we save more thanks to them than we spend. Scalability. If our team is well automated, if we relieve it of many manual tasks, many repetitive tasks, then, de facto, with the same team we will be able to serve a larger number of clients.

What does this mean? Of course, I do not have to explain to anyone here. We perfectly understand the consequences. Competitive advantage. Faster decisions, better use of data, builds our advantage, builds our certainty, builds our quality. Thanks to this, not only will our clients be more satisfied, but if our clients are more satisfied, then they will much more willingly recommend us

to other places, to further clients, thanks to which it will be much easier for us to grow, much easier for us to function, we will be able to really start focusing on the strategic elements of the functioning of our department or enterprise, and not focus on putting out fires. So I think that the gains for the company that we can obtain by implementing automation, AI, or custom software are very clear.

But here we also have one more very important aspect. Namely, automation is one thing, tools are one thing, that is some part of success. However, the key is also choosing the right technology partner, who will help us, de facto, get through all this smoothly, implement all this in such a way that it will actually bring us value, and not bury us in projects that are eternal IT projects and never end.

Choosing a technology partner and invitation to consultation

A good technology partner will first of all indicate to us the solutions that are worth implementing and those that are not worth implementing.

Because of course it may seem to us that everything is worth it, because there are certain trendy terms, because there are many trendy solutions, but that is not always exactly true. It is worth choosing a partner who already has several implementations behind them and who very strongly and critically approaches our ideas. Because of course it may hurt our ego that someone criticized our idea, but at the end of the day, if they backed it up with factual arguments, it can only indicate that the partner we are talking to is professional and wants

our success, and does not just want us to leave as much money as possible with them without delivering business value. Very important is good fit—that is, we have to understand whether with a given partner we will cooperate well, whether they, de facto, also understand our…

Please pay attention to how many questions a potential partner asks, how much they want to go deep with understanding before you even start the project, because this means only one thing—that they want to prepare properly and want to give you clear, factual answers, and not just sell you their service as quickly as possible. De facto this will also cause us to be able to enjoy results in a much shorter time, because such a partner will be able to propose some first small steps

that will already be able to start bringing first results in a fairly short time. And here I wanted to invite you to a free consultation, which we always do for companies that want to cooperate with us, where we conduct such a two-hour workshop, in which we try to understand what problem you have, suggest some further steps, some further actions, thanks to which we will be able to build your competitive advantage together with you.

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