By Abdullah L. Khan

The scenario of the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the business in multiple ways. Simultaneously, it has created some opportunities for businesses to stand out of the box. This increases the need of bringing digital transformation in the company to secure innovation in the organizational products and services.

The coronavirus pandemic is pushing ventures from manufacturing, retail, and service providers for reevaluating their business models where the traditional ‘social’ and ‘in-person’ setting is the norm. As a result, ventures started to realize the requirement of integrating a bigger portion of their business process with an advanced ‘contactless method of offering their services and products. Otherwise, they will confront the alternative option of closing operations until the pandemic is over. Given the present status of the pandemic, that is equivalent to a death sentence for those businesses. SMEs are no diverse - which stand for Small & Medium Enterprises, if not more frantic, for reconsidering their business models for overcoming the present crisis and similar future circumstances. Here comes the role of digital transformation consulting.

When it approaches SMEs adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments acted a vital role in directing SMRs for weathering the storm. Governments offered both unprecedented and swift support at a bigger scale than in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. Support came in the shape of tax deferrals, direct loans, and grants to lead temporary redundancies, wage subsidies, and assistants for minimized working hours. The logic of these measures is 'verify later, give money now', which was the justified approach, but SMEs should comprehend, these are temporary measures and the assistance of digital transformation consulting services is the key to dwelling in the current and future crises.

The reason for going digital

Digitalization and digital tools have confirmed they can benefit SMEs. It has been analyzed that companies implementing digital tools improved their productivity by 16% and value by 25% on average.

Besides, digital tools can assist in avoiding an absolute economic halt for SMEs in the COVID-19 pandemic era. Having the capability to go digital became a matter of importance as it was observed across the world. Various SMEs demonstrating their capability to change their business model have survived; some have become failures to afloat.

As with each business, SMEs vary in size, industry, and level of experience. No matter what the dissimilarities are, proceeding digital is evinced to be a major benefit pre and post COVID-19 pandemic. Digitalization and digital tools can succor SMEs in reducing expenses, standardizing and automating business processes, and minimizing the reliance on manpower. Besides, going digital will enrich SMEs' competitiveness and recognize customer behavior.

Ensuring the digitalization of SMEs

After spotting the light on ‘Why’, SMEs should transform digitally, nature follow-up ‘How’; to

effectively transform should be addressed to confirm constant profitability in times of economic disruption and challenges and ‘Who’ are stakeholders engaged in the process.

Technological implementation of digital tools is especially useful for micro and small businesses. However, there is a crack in digital tools implementation between SMEs and large businesses, especially in e-commerce and cloud computing. Governments can mitigate this gap by furnishing SMEs with skill development, process innovation programs, and organizational change.

Another crucial role for governments is offering proper infrastructure to direct B2B transactions and using digital tools to optimize public services such as E-government portals to ease license issuance and other services to SMEs.

Similarly, large tech organizations have a role to perform in heading the digitalization of SMEs. Identifying the requirement of SMEs and offering digital tools and solutions to direct the transfer of SMEs businesses for going online is a crucial factor in the continuity and survival of various SMEs.

SMEs role in digital transformation

While the private and public sectors have pointed their significance out in digitalization and

implementation of digital tools for SMEs, they appear in second place and some scenarios last when compared to the role of SMEs should embrace.

SMEs should reconsider and recraft their business with a focus on the ways of leveraging social media, data analytics, mobile connectivity, cloud computing and integrate these tools into their business model. The digital transformation advisory services for SMEs need to be incorporated into all business areas for delivering value to consumers and ensuring business continuity.

SMEs' digital transformation has shown to be pivotal long before the COVID-19 pandemic and after it hit, that significance only escalated apparent and stronger to cover SME's business sustainability. It is a constant process of challenging the present status as technologies keep progressing and for SMEs to cope up, they should elicit this process to thrive and grow.

Bottom Line

With the expansion of the digital economy and the present COVID-19 pandemic, the future of the economy worldwide will have everything to do with digitalization. Cutting-edge technologies like blockchain, 5G, IoT, robots, AI, cloud computing, data science, and the appearance of new digitalized business models, will change the worldwide economy radically. SMEs are a linchpin of the economic progress of most regions of the globe.

When confronted with changes, SMEs need to harness digital technologies and endorse

digitalization. Also, they need to learn from successful digital transformation consulting firms and other new business models and hunt for opportunities for scaling up their own added value in the wave of digitalization. SMEs need to overcome also the deficiency in resources, deficiency in experiences in the adoption of new technologies that will let them become successful and attain a wider market.

SMEs' digitalization will improve its competitiveness and benefit society also. Additionally, as the core driver of regional economic extension and advancements, SMEs' digitalization acts as an important part in improvising a sustainable and inclusive economy. Recently, digitalization solutions have greatly contributed to the sustainable development goals and minimized wealth cracks, optimized gender equality, and replied to climate change, securing people access to the resources vital to their survival. As the world carries on to go digital, also digitalization has much to do with the progression of governments and the effect of their policies on the digital transformation strategy consulting trend.