On May 12th, 2015, ROK Solution invited 200 company managers and partners to their conference called “Digital: Year One”.
Many exceptional speakers have taken the floor to share their experience, views, and advice. The main theme, Company digitalization, is one of the most high-stakes and pressing matters for professionals in 2015. Not only is it a path to profitable growth that proves to be both reliable and relevant, but also inevitable.
Current mutations in economic models are redefining capitalistic balance
Gilles Babinet, Digital Champion for France at the European Commission, starts the conference with his analysis of company digitalization around the world, and more specifically in France:
- Yes, company digitalization has indeed begun, but with a wrong start. Major actors have failed to anticipate the magnitude of this revolution before the rise of sizeable competition. Thus, AirBnB owns no hotels, yet sells more nights today than the five biggest hotel networks in the world.
- How can we make companies digital? One word: PLATFORM. Digital Companies no longer have an Information System; they have become their own IS. The platform grants flexibility and ease of use. The consequence of this fast evolution is a drastic anthropologic shift that leaves the main actors on the market frightened: company silos are broken, hierarchy structures are flattened down, teams of ten gather around pizza in open space offices…
- Going digital will make large-scale industrialization possible for your company in any and all sectors, helping optimize processes, report KPI in real time, promote innovation, in other words, become more efficient and competitive. But this digital revolution process is currently lagging behind in France (15th country out of 28 according to a European study). Investments are clearly below what we see in other OECD countries. Why is that? Data culture has not yet settled in France, return on investments for digitalization processes are not known in advance, taxation on risk capital can prove discouraging. And yet, France has seen a few companies break through, albeit too rarely. Cisco CEO John Chambers decided to invest in France after seeing impressive French innovations presented at the CES in Las Vegas.
- How can we popularize company digitalization in France? Raising Top and Middle Management awareness on the matter, learning how to tell value proposition and onboard technology apart, promoting innovation funding, and introducing data culture into the organization are all crucial steps to this transformation, and it is essential for France to follow them in order to remain a top player.
ROK, the perfect solution for digital transformation leaders
Daniel Gaujac, Partner for DigitasLBi, the first digital global agency, steps on stage next. DigitasLBi is proud to count Amazon, Google, Coca-Cola Company, American Express, LVMH Group and many others among their clients. Daniel Gaujac delivers an expert statement on what makes ROK Solution the perfect tool to help your company go through its digital transition:
- ROK Solution works as an App generator. Their concept is to work in synergy with businesses, and allow companies to design the app they need in a simple, intuitive, and time-efficient way. They can then benefit from increased efficiency, optimized processes, automation for time-consuming tasks with no added value, and so on. Two examples: Dirigeants & Partenaires have developed the Gold Mine app, and BearingPoint have created their Asset-Based Consulting branch.
- What about the costs, then? What are the numbers? Nil. Zero development costs, no maintenance expenses, no additional IT Management costs. The Digital Revolution is now accessible without the need of a multinational-size budget. Décathlon have developed an app for accounting closure in 4 man-days, which allowed them to save 35 000 emails worth of manpower, amounting to 200 man-days.
- ROK is a Cloud-native solution. ROK was not adapted or ported to the cloud; it was born from Cloud technology, and has been developed natively on it. As a consequence, deploying ROK and developing apps on the platform offers virtually limitless possibilities, both in terms of numbers and adaptability.
- Collaborative Intelligence is emerging. The benefits of designing your own app do not stop at process optimization. It also allows new offers to emerge quickly, such as BearingPoint’s Asset Based Consulting (detailed below in Erik Campanini’s intervention).
- As far as IT Management is concerned, ROK Solution bolsters your present software infrastructure with the power of cloud computing and increases visibility on who does what, how and with which tool, dynamically and in real time. The platform also enhances mobility on the entire structure.
Daniel Gaujac finished his intervention by highlighting the “Made in France” aspect of ROK Solution, but also showed ROK was the only platform dedicated to company digitalization available on the market today.
Dirigeants & Partenaires – Gain a competitive advantage through digitalization. ROK Solution, a new game changer on the market.
Kevin Barrett, President of Dirigeants & Partenaires then took the floor, seconded by Alain Portmann, Partner in the same company. Dirigeants & Partenaires aims to support career change for high-level executives through personalized coaching and networking solutions. They mention the benefits of the Gold Mine app, which they have designed in ROK Solution, and explain why this platform is the market’s new game changer.
- Dirigeants & Partenaires (D&P) deals in the highly competitive market of Outplacement. They aim to stand out by providing a highly qualified, easily accessible professional network to their clients. In order to achieve this, after having been disappointed by available tools and solutions, D&P chose to develop their own professional networking app on ROK Solution’s platform. And so the GoldMine app was born.
- When you look for a job, you need to start by asking yourself three questions: Who is the right person to get in touch with? Who must I contact to get to this person? What is the best plan to follow to reach them? In order to answer these questions accurately, a great deal of research and database cross-referencing often needs to be done, along with the risks inherently conveyed by the sheer amount of data involved. GoldMine was designed to simplify the research needed to answer these three questions, by laying out steps logically into processes. Thanks to GoldMine, D&P clients can then access the most relevant databases, while benefitting from an optimized approach which allows them to forgo multiple logins and access info to different databases.
Alain Portmann then commented on a GoldMine simulation video and talked about the app’s expected Return on Investment:
- GoldMine allows our clients to boost their reach from a few hundred prescribers to several thousand, pooling personal networks together. We have heard about clients who saved a tremendous amount of time and resources. Research processes before could take up to an hour, going through manual or other erratic archiving methods which made ulterior follow-ups a lot harder. The GoldMine research process takes about five minutes, and no more than five clicks..
Kevin Barrett concludes this presentation by defining ROK as a real “game changer”. Thanks to the platform, D&P gains an undisputable advantage over their competitors, who boast high quality professional networks, yet still fail to deliver what they promise.
Digitalization: “Everyone wants in”
Michaël Tartar, ROK Solution Executive Vice-President, also happens to be an expert on business model changes brought by digitalization:
- The digital world has completely changed the way we access the market. Banking and loan systems have seen the rise of crowdfunding campaigns, Tesla Motors’ market capitalization is higher than Renault’s, BlaBlaCar helps 10 million customers travel with no transportation infrastructure. In short, everyone wants in on this emerging market brought over by digitalization.
- On a global scale, we have seen major actors on the market place massive investments: Leclercq group has announced a 1 billion euro investment over the next three years, and Accor Group plans to invest 250 million euros. This raises the following question: which solutions will be used to achieve this digital transformation?
- When a company chooses to go digital, they allow their associates to work where and when they want, with the tools they want, achieving better balance between their professional and personal life. To achieve this, companies need connected and connectable IT solutions, and systems that can interface with external networks. They need to be agile, flexible, redefining themselves and adapting in real time, with no limits. By going digital, they can finally be a part of this sharing economy brought over by digitalization.
- More specifically, this company digitalization process rests on six pillars, which are integrated into ROK Solution’s platform:
- Organization modeling: silos need to disappear, let’s put the individual back at the heart of organization.
- Application cross-connection: make the most of all available data
- Completely customized application creation
- Personalized interface design: every partner has their own needs and requirements
- Multi-device: partners must have access to their tools on any and all platforms, (smartphones, laptops and so on) with no inherent limitation.
- Flexible technology: tools must be used to meet partners’ requirements, whatever they may be, and not the opposite.
Michaël Tartar concludes his intervention, stating that many aim to follow this model, but don’t necessarily succeed, the most telling examples of this unsuccessful transition being consulting firms.
He then gives the floor to BearingPoint, one of ROK’s partners, who are gearing up to properly anticipate this paradigm shift.
BearingPoint: The Digital era, consulting firms’ most important challenge
The second partner speech is given by Erik Campanini, from BearingPoint, who shares his experience as the member of a leading consulting firm. He highlights the fact that the need for digitalization comes from client demand, which makes it crucial for consulting firms to follow through with this process.
- The abrupt change of pace in the market and the sheer number of client interactions are exerting a lot of pressure on companies. End consumers are expecting a completely different experience, which makes it essential for companies to undergo drastic transformations. These mutations stem from client demand, but also from partners, and following them requires the implementation of a whole new kind of platform, fully flexible and focused on the individual.
- Quite evidently, these changes have a significant impact on consulting firms and their own business model, in four areas: sales processes, information delivery, in-house organization models and new tool-based services (Asset-Based Consulting).
- On these aspects, ROK Solution managed to interest BearingPoint. Thanks to their solution, from the very first client meeting, service providers can model a process, create it and activate it from their IT infrastructure. Thanks to ROK, BearingPoint are among the only firms able to provide an almost immediate proof-of-concept. ROK Solution allows companies to collaborate more easily, leaving room for improvisation and creative thinking.
ROK ‘n’ Wall: a partner-centric solution
Olivier Bourrouilh, ROK Solution CEO and event organizer, then took the floor to give a more in-depth presentation of their Collaborative Intelligence solution:
- ROK Solution allows to gather data on who, does what, how, with which tools, in how much time, with which risks, and with how much control. This data is accessible anywhere, at any moment, on any platform or device, effortlessly. This is a client-centric and partner-centric Collaborative Intelligence solution.
- Within ROK, users can be aware of any and all partners or associates, anywhere in the world, but they can also reach the entire ecosystem (clients and providers), in real time. Modeling inside ROK’s platform is very easily done, either through logic diagrams, or from existing databases and documents, even intuitively, from scratch. This model is cross-operated with the IT environment. In other words, ROK Solution creates its own interface with company tools thanks to web services, in full consideration of risk mappings, internal audit, and any other monitoring tool.
- A few examples: BearingPoint has laid out 300 workflows in 10 man-days. It took one of their clients less than two months to model 180 workflows and a network of 200 partners. International insurance and loans expert Coface have laid out their Complaint Management processes involving 1200 partners within 96 countries in less than two months.
- ROK Solution supports multiple languages and time zones. The platform is available worldwide. Navigation is done through a cube, with a customizable dashboard, compatible with any device, including smartphones and tablets.
- ROK provides an answer to all the requirements of a digital company. The solution allows them to pilot Information System rights in real time, lay out exogenous workflows that are interconnected thanks to APIs, design their own application components, communicate through an internal, controlled social network, and port their solution to all devices.
- ROK Solution acts as a digital office, but also gives mobility to every element of a company’s Information System.
- In other words, ROK Solution is to digitalization what smartphones were to telephones. Just like this previous revolution, which gathered already existing tools present on different terminals inside only one, (phone calls, audio and video playback, internet connection and browsing, etc.), ROK integrates BPM, BAM and BPA tools, but also CRM and ERM, workflows and CSNs, which already existed as stand-alone protocols but were not integrated together. Thanks to this tool unification, ROK can also uphold their “zero-mail” quality commitment.
Olivier Bourrouilh then commented on a video that concretely showed the different steps of an expense account validation process, operated on a smartphone. The complete process, which involved ERP integration, document storage with visualization and setting up a complete standardized process, took less than five minutes to complete.
- All the major actors on the market are starting to look in the direction company digitalization, but no one really makes the leap, because of how complex the technological challenge seems to be. Firstly, leading solutions have all been developed “on premise”, on servers, and are thus impossible to migrate to the Cloud. Leaders are selling SaaS, but not multi-instance, multi-tenant Cloud services. Secondly, let’s look at rights management and operability. As of now, ROK Solution are the only solution with patented algorithms, based on an organic, systematic approach which identifies individuals as the center of the Information System, builds an architecture around it, and pushes the relevant applications, tools and interfaces, at the right moment. The final reason is economic. Leaders are not necessarily ready to place massive investments and completely redesign their existing solutions, their business model or their go-to market..
A second, more concrete video of how ROK is used was then shown, exhaustively displaying the modeling of a complex pre-existing text-based process, and the generation of a customized dashboard and desktop.
- To conclude, a few statistics comparing our clients’ usage of ROK Solution to other solutions on the market. Usage costs have decreased between 30 to 40%, development times are 80% shorter, information flow quantity was reduced by 80%, employees have sent 75% less e-mails, and creating a specific, efficient working community (including individuals in and outside of the company) can now be done in one click. Thanks to ROK, our clients can reduce costs, optimize flows and resources, and promote innovation..
ROK Solution: A French pioneer in digital transformation
To bring the conference to a close, Arnaud Montebourg, former French Minister of Economy, takes the floor. He explains why he supports ROK Solution, a pioneer in digital transformation.
- Being a pioneer in their field, ROK Solution may have been misunderstood. They had to go through dire times, and tried to open doors that would only close. Arnaud Montebourg was aware of the fact that the digital revolution was a force of society, which we needed to try and understand in order to use it to its full potential rather than being threatened by it, and this is why he chose to support ROK’s promising solutions, to ensure that the productive actors would apprehend it more easily.
- France has always been a country of revolutions. This technological groundswell, along with the radicalization of production efficiency, and reduction of production costs make it crucial for production powers to adapt, accept new challenges and think ahead of changes to come. This head start is also what ROK Solution provides, and this is why, after receiving support from Innovation programs, Arnaud Montebourg chose, as a former minister, but also as a committed citizen, to publicly support them.
Arnaud Montebourg clearly stressed how much he wished to see French companies, investors, engineers and executives show how they could bring a new revolution to the world.
The conference ended under the applause of 200 attendees, and went on with the exceptional buffet of the French Automobile Club Library.
