Today's advanced digital technologies, such as automation and artificial intelligence, hold incredible promise for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). These technologies allow SMBs to punch above their weight by making their workflows more efficient and freeing up their manpower to do other tasks that bring more value to the organization. These technologies also help break down silos within the organization, where business divisions operate independently and information is not shared, which could result in inefficiencies and delays.
Tumii Transformations, a Canada-based company specializing in data management and digital transformation, has created its Integrated Transformation Model (IXM), which is a unique methodology that uses a comprehensive approach to assess business challenges at the operational level, not only the technological needs.
IXM allows Tumii to tackle its clients' issues in various areas, such as user acceptance of new technologies, scalability of solution design, ongoing improvement, data preservation and policy implementation. Tumii's work is spread across five areas, namely data, process, policy, technology, change and governance.
According to digital transformation specialist and Tumii Transformation founder Shawn Acheampong, Tumii has helped multiple SMB clients overhaul their old, outdated processes and integrate new technologies to streamline business, benefiting both the companies and their customers.
"Digital transformation is not just a single project — it is a series of many smaller projects," Acheampong said. "This could encompass building a filing system, creating a data retention policy, migrating all business documents into a central database, training people how to operate the technology and integrating all those systems together. These require significant investment, and doing them separately is more expensive, both in money and time. We're in an exciting time where 10X'ing or 100X'ing your business operations is achievable. We love to walk through that journey of transformation with our clients that they never thought was possible. Through our IXM, Tumii Transformations is able to offer a complete digital transformation solution that allows SMBs to fulfill their growth potential at the same level as a Fortune 500, without breaking the bank."
For example, Tumii recently worked with a century-old company that was operating almost exclusively on paper, dealing with people from all over the world and issuing them engineering licenses in Canada. It did not have online applications and, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, their entire business came to a screeching halt. Tumii helped it digitize its entire process to allow it to operate again. It set up an on-site digitization center while everyone was working from home.
"We enabled them to have online electronic access to the applicant's files," Acheampong said. "By making the files secure and centrally available online, this allowed people to get their licenses approved without the staff being physically in the office. Now that the files are digital, these are now connected to their customer relationship management (CRM) system, enabling digital processing of applications, rather than manually. This greatly reduced the license turnaround time from two to four years to six months equaling over 800% in time savings for their customers."
In another project, Tumii worked with a publication house that has been receiving donations and requests for product orders from around the world via mail for the past 30 years. It would receive thousands of mails per month, and the average time to process each one was around 15 to 20 minutes, increasing the chance of errors. Tumii implemented a digital process that scans each parcel's contents, such as order forms, brochures and correspondence. Once everything is scanned, an AI tool reads the documents and updates the system. This reduced the cycle time per mail from 20 minutes each to just over one minute, netting an overall 600% cost and time-saving. What currently is a two-person job can be reduced to a single person, freeing up the other employee to do different value-added tasks.
"Our system analyzes what we call 'waste,' which includes routine and redundant tasks that employees do, as well as waiting times and regret work. Waste actions involve touching things more than necessary for them to be complete. So, we examine our client's processes and identify all the instances of waste. We heavily use robotics and AI to reduce the manual touches and allow the system to do it on behalf of our client's employees," Acheampong said.
He added that Tumii believes a digital transformation goes beyond buying fancy software or designing a file structure. With this in mind, Tumii offers a unique subscription model that bundles together several digital transformation services inclusive of various specialties. Instead of hiring multiple and separate specialists, each charging their own fee, the subscription model offers a single, cost-effective solution.
