On average, the businesses that produce profit margins of more than 10 points higher and growth rates almost 20 points higher than their best competition are the ones that exemplify the digital business design. In other words, they integrate a smart business model with business-driven exploitation of digital options – e-business. These differences in results are staggering; and the gap may grow wider as the early advantages that these leading companies have gained by digital reinventors are consolidated and used as the basis for taking and holding even greater market share.  

The pioneers of digital business have achieved such results by taking advantage of eight specific benefits that’s represented by the following shifts:  

 

From Guessing to Knowing

With e-business design, the basis of a company’s decision has shifted from guessing what customers want to knowing exactly what they do. Using online forums, businesses can know what products that their customers want before they have to manufacture and distribute them. Businesses can use this knowledge to improve customer satisfaction and mine real-time customer information to find new opportunities.  

 

From Disparity to Perfect Fit

A major source of frustration for customer comes from the mismatch between what they actually want and the compromises that they have no choice usually but to accept in deciding from a fixed product line. Digital business design allows companies to give the value proposition to their customers that result in a perfect fit.  

 

From Dragging to Immediacy

The desire for speed in obtaining information and sharing within a business is no secret. Digital business design enables the flow of information from slowly processing to receiving immediately.  

 

From Supplier to Customer Self-Service
Increasingly, customers prefer the convenience of online ordering and customer service over relying on the supplier to perform these tasks. With e-business, a company’s customer service model shifts to self-service.  

 

From Minimum-Value Productive Work to Maximum Talent Pull

Businesses waste critical resources by having employees perform routine, repetitive work nowadays. Digital business design shifts employees’ time to the most productive, customer-focused tasks.  

 

From Correcting to Preventing Mistakes

Errors in order processing, manufacturing and other procedures create frustration for customers and higher costs for suppliers. Now with the e-business format, quality control systems shift to preventing problems and errors.  

 

From Incremental to Exponential Productivity

Fractional improvements in efficiency don’t compare next to the giant leaps in productivity with digitalization. This has taken hold in one industry after another with productivity growing from a norm of 10% in improving to 10x the gains.  

 

From Separate Entities to Full Integration

No business can respond to the challenges and opportunities of a rapidly changing environment without being able to share vital information and act on it with minimal delay. Such rapid organizational response depends on internal integration. The digital business design leads to organizational structure shifts from a collection of separate departments and entities to a fully integrated system where ideas and solutions are shared.