Alessandro Ventura, CIO and VP Analytics and Business Services for Unilever North America, sees a distinction between digital transformation and digitization. “After a digital transformation your business is different than it was before,” he says. “Digitization, on the other hand, automates processes but does not change the substance of your business.”For Ventura, digital transformation starts with self-reflection and asking big questions—What should our business be in the future? How will we respond to shifts in competition and consumer behavior? How are we changing the customer experience?[ Be sure to learn the secrets of highly effective digital transformations — and beware the 7 myths of digital transformation. | Get the latest on digital transformation by signing up for our CIO Leader newsletters. ]
Digital transformation vs. digitization
In the past, Unilever’s customer business managers would manually enter baselines and promotional plans to reflect company sales forecasts as well as relevant events that might impact sales, or new store openings, into a product promotional planning tool. Ventura and his team recently replaced that legacy tool with a machine learning engine that calculates a baseline for every SKU and every retail customer and tells managers which promotional activities will be the most productive. The tool reviews promotional events and makes recommendations for changes; it also includes external factors, like an impending storm that will impact consumer demand, so that managers can do more precise scenario planning for their customers.To read this article in full, please click her
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