The only constant is change, the question is, how prepared is your business to respond quickly and effectively to disruption and change? And what can you do to improve future readiness?
To help answer these questions, the SAP Insights research center conducted a new study in May 2023 that surveyed 4,200 business leaders from 13 countries. When it comes to building resilience and future-readiness, we learned that there is no single silver bullet.
True resilience requires a web of interconnected priorities, investments, and behaviors. But all of these things had one thing in common: they touched business processes. We found significant correlations between the capacity to improve and transform business processes and increased business resilience, future readiness, and better business outcomes.
High-Level Findings Show Key Trends
As explored in a new paper, this study modeled levels of business resiliency based on self-assessments of the ability to respond to disruption, satisfaction with the ability to prepare for the future, and data accessibility to generate insights and make decisions. Businesses were then modeled to compare the most resilient firms (referred to as the “top-quartile companies”) and the least resilient firms (referred to as the “bottom-quartile companies”).
Businesses in the top quartile are the most satisfied with their current ability to prepare for the future using strategies such as staying current with technology, increasing business process flexibility, and responding to new customer demands (see Figure 1). In contrast, the bottom quartile’s self-assessment shows a clear lack of confidence in these areas.
What about their future readiness to handle unexpected change and disruption? To assess this, the survey asked respondents about their future investment plans to improve their ability to handle disruptions. If you look at Figure 2, what’s interesting is that for the top resiliency quartile, the cup is half full; the positive responses range around +/- 50% in the top quartile, meaning the other half (even in the top quartile) does not have effective plans in place to respond to disruption – at least not yet.
Keys to Confidence in Business Resilience and Future Readiness
Most importantly, future-proof, resilient businesses are much more likely to be agile, process-centric organizations that are engaged in continuous process improvement, change management, and employee training to achieve specific business objectives and outcomes. In addition, to realize their goal of being more future-ready, they are more likely to invest in process efficiency improvements and new technologies such as automation and AI that can force both subtle and radical reworking of existing ways of working.
These types of process-centric choices can pay off – big time. For example, the study found that companies scoring in the top 25% on the attributes of future business preparedness are more likely to anticipate revenue growth of 6% or higher. Conversely, companies that score in the bottom 25% on the same attributes are more likely to experience stagnation or lower growth.
Want to Learn More?
Being able to innovate and adapt processes to meet new demands is vital to increasing business resiliency and future readiness. But it requires data-driven insights about your processes, a continuous process management approach, and a corporate culture that prioritizes innovation and new technology adoption. This mix of ingredients is what’s needed for a resilient, future-proof organization.
To learn more, explore the full study’s findings here.
Read the full article here
