The pitfall of digitization is therefore digitization itself.

“Digitization is synonymous with change, including in the way people work and perform their everyday duties. Which is very much a stumbling block in a lot of cases. Doing what you previously did on paper in the digital world doesn’t work”, explains Youston’s CTO Wim Vanoeveren.

“We guide our customers through the digital switch. In doing so, we rely on our long-standing experience and the challenges we have successfully taken on in the past in a wide variety of different sectors of trade and industry.”

“As explained, digitization also affects the way people work and carry out their duties. People tend to think in terms of their current context and struggle to grasp how the new digital environment will benefit them. Something which manifests itself in various ways. Let me just give you a few practical examples,” Wim goes on to say.

• Structures and folders: quite often, people want to simply copy/paste the existing structures and folders they are used to working with and transpose these into the new digital setting. We present them with a few use cases to show that this is not something that can be automatically transposed. What about items that have been archived the wrong way? How do you deal with duplicates? How do you know whether or not an item has been deleted? etc.
• Metadata and unique codes (bar or QR code): which metadata do we use, which categories do we go by? We act in compliance with the customer’s request and add extra data and categories which are necessary in our experience, so the structure is swiftly made fully functional.
• Rights: What is important in this respect is the right to delete records. Which is why, in building a digital structure, we consistently go by a ‘back-up’ plan which can be reverted at all times.
• Saves time: when duties and processes are digitized, this translates into efficiency and stability on the shop floor. Digitization also steps up productivity, cuts costs and saves time.
• …

“Obviously this short list is far from exhaustive. But it just goes to show the benefits to be had when we are called in to assist our customers with their digital transformation efforts, based on our wealth of experience. This is customers’ best guarantee of success with any digitization project.”