Baby Steps or Cannonball: The Future of Digital Payments and Getting Enterprises Up to Speed

7/8/2021
a store inside of a building

While consumer goods companies struggled to maintain day-to-day operations during the pandemic, they still uncovered the innovation and bandwidth required to overcome disruption and reprioritize strategic initiatives.

CGT explored how CGs and retailers can realign technology advancements — such as payment flexibility, supply chain responsiveness and subscription models — to seize the opportunities in today's new landscape. 

Alarice Rajagopal: Good morning everyone, welcome to our webinar, “From Supply Chains to Smart Payments: How Tech Can Help CGs Grow.” My name is Alarice Rajagopal, and I'm the senior editor of CGT. I'll be your moderator for today.

As we've all felt, consumer demand has shifted like never before as the global pandemic hit the CG industry last year. Not only was it difficult for CGs to operate through major hurdles and disruptions, reprioritizing strategies or put on the back burner, but retail companies as well have been able to pivot in order to meet these constantly changing demands.

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To help us discuss this further, I'm delighted to introduce our subject matter expert Elisabeth Bradley, SVP Business Development for Endava. Elisabeth works with Endava's clients in both retail and CPG to address business problems with digital innovations. Her work focuses on integrating customer experience, strategy and design with technology and data to deliver truly memorable and engaging experiences across all digital enterprises.

Elisabeth will be joined by chief digital officer, Justin Marcucci who is responsible for leading Endava’s global digital practice, both from a client engagement and digital delivery capacity. The digital philosophy Justin has instilled within the organization focuses on enabling businesses to dramatically improve the experience of their users through the introduction of technology, while giving the strategy, data and insight to evolve and succeed as overall market landscape changes. Justin and Elisabeth, thank you both for joining us today.

I’d like to start with some general trends. Justin, if I can come to you first on this one, what are some of the biggest shifts you've seen after last year? What trends will remain sticky post-pandemic?

Justin Marcucci: That's a great question. Certainly we saw a massive amount of change across all industries, not just retail and CPG, over the course of the last year. One of the most interesting trends that we saw is that many businesses thought they were digital before the pandemic, thinking they had this digital thing covered, they didn’t have to worry about it. All businesses at this point have gone through the exercise of digitization and going through that transformation.

But it wasn't until the lockdowns and the pandemic happened. All of a sudden humanity receded from their business and they were left with truly a non-human interaction that was driving the way people were interacting with customers. That’s when most businesses realized, "Oh, you know what? We actually have some real gaps here. There's still a big portion of the way that we operate our business." Whether that is in the customer interaction side or if it's on the operational fulfillment side, where people, humans making decisions and closing the gaps in those processes were still required.

Within the first two or three months of the lockdowns occurring, we saw across all industries, and particularly in the retail and CPG space, that there was a huge amount of breakage happening within those businesses and we had to very quickly figure out ways to start to patch those. We actually had to shore up those channels to ensure that there was the right connectivity through that process. Once a lot of those bridges were fixed, we found that those organizations relaxed a bit, and collectively as a global society, came to grips with the situation that people needed to start thinking much more dramatically about how they were going to alter their business to exist in the digital future pandemic or otherwise.

Some of the trends that we are seeing that established themselves, and we'll certainly continue now, is this notion that businesses have to truly be digital-first. Particularly in the retail space, organizations have to realize that they have to shift the model of thinking where they're a digital company first. Then, once people come back to stores, how will brick-and-mortar locations support the digital business, as opposed to brick-and-mortar being the rock of the organization and digital being this online thing that adds value as well. That fundamental shift of the industry is something that will absolutely stay from a trend standpoint as we move forward. Elisabeth, what do you think?

Elisabeth Bradley: I have to agree with you. It's funny, the one thing that this has really taught us is that you can't actually predict what's going to happen. That has really been proven again and again, we think we're going to have this many jobs next month but then it falls short. Then the next month it just ramps right up. I was listening to an interview with somebody who is responsible for economic forecasting and she said, "Lately it feels like we're just sticking our fingers in the air." With anticipating demands on the supply chain, and the ebbs and flows of goods and consumer demands over the last year, that unpredictability is something that will continue to be a trend for a little while, and that's something everybody is going to have to deal with.

We've also learned a lot about consumers: what they look for in terms of value from products, how they engage with brands and the relationships that they've built over however many years. There's a recognition that marketing and relationships with brands has changed and will continue to change. If you think about global supply chains being completely upended by some TikTok-ers 30-second video on, it was CeraVe, a L’Oréal product that was recommended by dermatologists previously. That they're being found in different and new ways.

“That transformation and understanding of what the future might look like is going to drive the next six months, especially considering we jumped five to 10 years in a year from a transformation standpoint.”
Elisabeth Bradley, Endava

That has been proven exponentially over the last year — it’s something that consumer businesses and retailers are going to have to learn to get better at. To Justin's point, all of that requires data and understanding of what to do with that. That transformation and understanding of what the future might look like is going to drive the next six months, especially considering we jumped five to 10 years in a year from a transformation standpoint.

Rajagopal: That actually brings me to my next question. With consumer demands obviously came an urgency for faster digital transformation, which I never could have even imagined with how fast it was moving already. But CGs and retailers need to be flexible to try and keep up. Justin, how can CG companies adapt digital strategies to better engage with consumers?

Marcucci: There's actually a couple of parts to this answer. The most important one is that organizations need to release some reticence around change. The quest for perfection is something which should never, never be sought. The biggest impetus for all of this digital change right now is that customers' expectations have changed so dramatically. The only way to keep up with a rapidly changing set of customer expectations is to not try to do too much at one time as an organization, as you're starting to put in place the components of your digital strategy moving forward.

You have to start to think about things in a far more agile way and be comfortable with much shorter iteration cycles around product concept work — kind of this test-and-learn model of putting smaller pieces of technology, that frankly, aren't baked nearly as much as you would previously, into a better engagement with your customers. Let them participate in the process of refining a lot of different possible digital interactions or digital products to determine what's going to work.

Within the CPG space previously, there was this quest for big flagship engagements and moments of release that we're going to have this big huge bang around it from a PR and market impact standpoint. We can't do that anymore. It requires such inordinate levels of time and money investment to have that big bang release, that by the time you make a decision to do something, time elapses as you're building it, refining it, and the market will pass you by. Organizations have to fundamentally shift the way they think about putting new digital components of the product landscape in the market. They have to do it on a far more iterative basis.

Bradley: If you're looking at consumer packaged goods in the traditional sense, a lot of people think about those 100-year-old brands that have survived a lot of different experiences over the years, and changing business models, all of that. The resiliency is there, but how they adapt and become more resilient for the future has got to change. They're competing with the Allbirds, with the digital natives that are popping up and meeting a very specific consumer niche, where some of those larger, historic consumer packaged goods brands can't compete in that model because R&D efforts and product launch efforts span this amount of time. It's a long-term model for these historic brands, but that's got to shrink in the way that you talk about converting from an on premise environment to a cloud-hosted environment.

You have to go from these big, long research cycles, and then go and test it. That's a long drawn-out cycle. Obviously, there's a place for that in certain markets, such as pharmaceuticals and things like that. In other ways, when we're talking about technology, there's an opportunity to prototype, see if it works, and then move on. That's in marketing and those places where you can test-and-learn and move quickly.

Pepsi had done a really good job in the pandemic launch of direct-to-consumer sites — it was 30 or 60 days, really fast. To think about a brand like Pepsi pivoting, and being able to spin that up so quickly, not just building a website, but the back office, supply chain, and everything else to support that proves that it's possible for these large CPGs to make those shifts. However, it requires investment, planning, and e-commerce teams. It takes bits and pieces along the way from an investment standpoint, testing and learning, but it can be done.

It’s been proven over the last year that digital strategies can be done all at once, or you can take that strategic roadmap towards a more agile delivery model and have these iterative releases, and continue to meet those consumer demands as they evolve, rather than a big launch or dump of product at one point in time.

Marcucci: What's interesting is the notion of this grand digital strategy, we need to get away from that. Certainly an organization needs to know the direction that they're heading, have a comfort level that it's over there, we're going to get over there. We're not sure the path we're going to take, or what exactly the trip is going to look like. One of the biggest problems with a big grand digital strategy is, again, this notion of having everything figured out, which prevents you from actually just getting on with it and getting started. If you're comfortable with a slightly more ephemeral digital strategy, something that's a little cloudy that still requires some detail. As an organization, you can come to grips with that as a journey.

You can just start the work, you can start testing bits of that approach. Again, start releasing niche products or niche experiences that allow you to validate the components of that, gauge your customer expectation, interest, whether it's the larger ecosystem of organizations that you operate with. Start to get the data and feedback from how that's working, but then start to provide some of the details of that larger aspirational state that you want to get to.

But you have to be able to get started. If you overthink things, it will absolutely ruin a lot of organizations over the course of the next five to 10 years. You have to be comfortable with just getting on with it and learning as you go.

"A lot of the work we're doing is to take previously manual processes — when there is human interaction — and drive that process from a central location via APIs into a series of connected interfaces."
Justin Marcucci, Endava

Rajagopal: Sometimes that’s easier said and done. We had covered that PepsiCo story, how quickly they switched to DTC, and it's still one of the most read pieces of content because people want to know how. Just start and adjust as you go. At least you're starting with something that definitely resonates here.

I want to switch gears to the supply chain. We talked a lot about the challenges that brands have faced in the last year, but not more so than within the supply chain, or maybe it's just more talked about. Justin, in working with your CG clients, what are some of the challenges that they're facing with regards to the supply chain? More importantly, what can they do about it?

Marcucci: One of the biggest issues that the organizations we work with have had in the supply chain layer has been labor. Can they have the people available to do the things that need to be done such as unloading vehicles, picking and sorting, and all of those sorts of things. While that was very difficult to triage early on, it created a lot of the lengthening of the supply chain timings. What we're now starting to see is that there is an inordinate amount of energy in those organizations to automate that process as much as possible and allow the staff available to perform those sorts of roles, focus more on exception handling in an automated, robotically-geared supply chain warehouse management framework.

A lot of the work we're doing is to take previously manual processes — when there is human interaction — and drive that process from a central location via APIs into a series of connected interfaces. Whether those are iPads or tablets mounted onto forklift machinery or devices that are strapped to the arms of individuals actually working in the shelves' capacity. All the way through, there is now hyper-accurate LiDAR-based mapping of warehouse facilities, so we can choreograph the robotic motion of machinery throughout those locations to best drive efficiency within those particular kinds of engagements. There's been a dramatic uptake in the automation of big chunks of the supply chain process related to organizations trying to manage some of the biggest problems they have within that flow right now.

Bradley: Once you have automated processes, how do you continue to optimize those and find a place for the labor that may or may not have been displaced. That's something that companies do care about. A lot of companies are reinvesting staff that have been displaced by automated processes. But being able to do that requires data, knowing where your data is, how it's structured, and what you can do with it.

A lot of the conversations that I'm having these days are about our clients having the data, but it might not be in one place, or it’s not connected — that's in marketing and the supply chain. In the supply chain in particular we look at the global disruptions and really try to understand the impact on in- and out-flows within warehouses and distribution centers, and back-and-forth from manufacturers and the plants.

Really understanding where all your data is and what you can do with it by applying AI technology and machine learning to help identify some of those processes that could be automated, as well as serve up different viewpoints and dashboards. Enabling those predictive analytics that make it possible to say, "I can keep all of my product in-stock for 100% fill rate for Amazon, Walmart, Target," because direct-to-consumer and e-commerce are now demanding that consumer product manufacturers are able to have those fill rates.

It goes all the way back to the plant. If the plant isn't able to surface the data to get to the warehouse or the co-pack facility, then manage the in-flow and out-flow of that product, that makes it very hard to say, "Yes, I can give you 100% fill rate." That's where we’re talking about filling the void between the core ERP on the back end and connecting it to external data sources, including weather patterns and things like that. If we can anticipate that this is going to throw our schedule off by five days because there's a hurricane in the Gulf, then we can take the next-gen analytics and data available to build forecasting models that meet the needs of the retailers, the manufacturers, and the consumers.

Marcucci: To your point on displacement of staff, we're starting to see now — again, this is something that's been building over the last couple of months — there were issues from a supply chain standpoint based upon availability of labor. Now moving this out of these organizations allows us to realize that they have to think about the entire supply chain. We think of the entire manufacturing and distribution process in a way that is going to create, not just continuing jobs, but desirable jobs. There is certainly a place right now where there's a lot more competition for staff and employees that are going to be performing things.

We work with an organization that exists entirely in the cold storage and cold warehousing of products within that supply chain of large CPGs. The organization has a 100% attrition rate because the environment the staff work in is inhospitable — it’s eight degrees Fahrenheit or something like that. So there's this true concern that the people, if they have options for employment, aren’t going to go back to a very difficult environment to thrive in. That's changed the organization's approach to how they think about fulfillment and the management of that cold storage. They’re looking at what can be automated to prevent asking staff to be bundled up in layers of winter clothing to shiver in this storage facility.

How can the roles of those individuals be automated with robots so that those individuals can be moved to positions with a climate controlled cab within a warehouse or an overlooking-level office that has better conditions. Organizations have had to rethink, not just from a technology level, but from a staffing and humanity level, how they can change things to better cope with the realities and expectations of the market and their staff. We enable that stuff via technology as an industry.

Rajagopal: We were in meetings yesterday, and it was one of the biggest concerns when we talked about talent and finding people right now for retail and CG for some of those jobs. It's interesting to look at some of the technologies that can certainly help with that.

Speaking of CG and retail, CGT is focused on consumer goods but our sister brand, RIS, is focused on retail tech. We always collaborate because we're looking for ways for CGs and retailers to work closer together. I want to switch to a solution area that can also have mutual benefits for both payment options. How can flexibility and payment options benefit both sides? Are there any collaboration use cases you can share?

“[The subscription model] provides a level of visibility from a supply standpoint and a demand standpoint — it provides more data and predictability to both the retailer and prevents keeping those goods in-stock to be able to fill that demand.”
Justin Marcucci, Endava

Marcucci: For example, advanced payment options within the joint space of CG and retail need to be thought about in a payment capacity. It needs to be about the customer first, so if we want to drive the volume from the throughput, we have to think about the ways that we can streamline that process from a customer-first standpoint. Again, it could be something as basic as taking a variety of different payment forms, being able to do digital wall-level payment, doing digital payments in and of itself. Think about it a little bit differently, start to think through the entire business model level payment shifts.

One of the interesting conversations we’ve had with both retail and CG clients has been around moving to more subscription-based models in terms of how a customer interacts with certain brands. What happens when you have less of an event-driven payment model, meaning “I want this thing, I'm going to get it, so I'm going to pay for it.” Based upon the nuance of what the actual product looks like, you can move closer to a subscription model. Now you're starting to talk about more predictable levels of demand that people are paying for. If it's a particular product that is going to have some protracted or predictable monthly burn. Rather than waiting for that individual to need and pay for it, step up and say, "I'm going to roughly pay this much on a monthly basis for this product.”

That provides a level of visibility from a supply standpoint and a demand standpoint — it provides more data and predictability to both the retailer and prevents keeping those goods in-stock to be able to fill that demand. From a CG standpoint and from a supply generation, understanding that they have more predictability now, and how to be comfortable outfitting and manufacturing that product. There are certain kinds of products where you're not going to buy subscription packages — for instance, cars — but smaller goods or smaller dollar amount products. It's an interesting model that provides a level of security for all components within the ecosystem and provides the consumer with even more flexibility in terms of engagement.

Bradley: I agree, subscription. It's funny, years ago I would talk with consumer manufacturers about a subscription model and say, "This is going to be the future,” and lo and behold, we're here. It’s really any kind of consumer good that you can think of, that's on a shelf — they're all over my kitchen. I've got auto subscriptions on everything because it's one less thing that I have to think about, as long as I'm consistent in use, it just shows up on my doorstep and that's fantastic. That’s something that requires management, every once in a while I have a HelloFresh that shows up and I forgot it was going to be here on Tuesday.

In addition to that kind of consumer need, there's an opportunity to own more of the consumer relationship by having those different payment options. The generation that is coming up in spending is a generation with exceptionally low credit card ownership and usage. You see a rise in what used to be layaway, that’s now an Affirm or Klarna solution. Shopify just announced they’ll provide this service to their merchants out of the box as well. That's what we're going to see more of in the future, and those different alternative payment methods will reduce friction at checkout, like a Google Pay or Apple Pay.

Those are tools, but you also see retailers like Walmart that are spinning out their own. Walmart pay functions as well. This helps consumer goods manufacturers because there’s less friction at checkout for those consumers. There's opportunity for adoption in direct-to-consumer channels as well, again, owning that customer relationship and that piece of it.

On the backend, we have a division that focuses fully on payments and banking. Looking at the future of banking and open banking, that's an opportunity for consumer goods to look at how payments are processed and move goods throughout the whole supply chain. There's opportunity in the consumer-facing payments space and flexibility there, but then on the backend as well, when you look at what the future of procurement looks like and how funds flow through that ecosystem.

Rajagopal: Elisabeth, what is the biggest learning over the past year for CG companies and what should they focus on moving forward?

Bradley: Fast forward on the digital strategy, five-year plans got executed in one year. That's something that should not be forgotten — it can be done. If you put your mind to it, you can repurpose entire manufacturing facilities to do something very purpose-driven. I listened to a video that Colgate did on the five big initiatives they honored within the organization. They sent out millions of bars of soap all out of one manufacturing facility, in 30 days or something like that. It’s the realization that you can stop everything and just change that if you put your mind to it.

That's something everybody should remember, we did go 10 years in a year. There were mistakes that were made and there are opportunities for improvement and optimization, but that shouldn't be the norm any longer. It can take this long to do something — there is recognition that it can be done faster, you can be nimble and agile, even if that's not your legacy. That’s something I'm hopeful everybody will learn and stay with us as the future continues to come fast and furious.

Marcucci: If we're thinking about what the big learnings are, there ended up being a lot of digital technology embedded into those businesses that end up being showpieces as opposed to practical pieces of digital tech that they're going to move the ball forward and move those organizations forward. There were less digital interactions falling into the core of a lot of those businesses. The pandemic happened. All of a sudden, organizations realized that a really cool piece of AR that they were going to release because it was going to drive great PR, it's probably not worth the investment. Let's use AR to solve a problem instead.

People are now applying these new technologies to real problems within their businesses. As opposed to that really cool digital thing, just being a pet project of an executive someplace that they're going to use for their earnings call, a story to tell. In those instances, we've seen so much progress within the digitization of businesses over the last 15 months. Like Elisabeth said, five to 10 years, because we actually had real problems that needed to be solved and organizations had no other option to solve with. Organizations have now realized that they shouldn't be reticent about trying to take on real problems with technology and they have to be more agile. That's the biggest learning that I've seen out of this entire thing over the course of the last year or so.

Rajagopal: How can partnering with solutions and services providers, like Endava, help?

Marcucci: Endava and other organizations also have the benefit of seeing a wide landscape of industries and of problems that organizations have. The benefit of partnering with an organization like ours is that you gain the knowledge, the experience of not just thousands of people around the globe that are doing this on a daily basis, but you get the best of pieces of technological implementation, problem solving, and product development in industries that are adjacent to the industry that the CG company would be in.

It's that adjacency of problem-solving and experience from working in other areas that gives us confidence. We'll give you the competence as a CG company to ensure that the investment you're making is going to generate the returns that you need and be as meaningful for the business as possible.

We have the ability to take our expertise from the in-true payments organizations and combine that with our expertise in CG or retail. You get this cross-functional multi-disciplinary team with a level of experience that, in a spectrum of solution scale, allows us to triangulate a far better outcome for whatever the prominence of being. The benefit of working with organizations like Endava or others is that you gain the scale and breadth of expertise for your particular problems.

Rajagopal: Elisabeth, do you have anything you can add?

Bradley: Justin did a great job of explaining where we bring value. That's the reason you go outside of your own organization, and we talked to a lot of businesses that say, "Well, we have an internal team to do that.” There's a lot of value in working with an outside partner, just like working with a mentor or somebody else that gives you an outside opinion. It gives you an additional point of view, and some additional bandwidth.

In a lot of cases we work with clients that say, "Well, we just can't get to that," it's low on the backlog or the priority list, but it's actually going to deliver a lot of value. That is where we are able to be nimble and agile, and really help customers and clients do the things that they can't get to because everybody has a day job. That is a really meaningful thing in this environment, where time to market is key.

Rajagopal: You guys have worked with so many different companies, you have that outside view. In terms of getting stakeholder buy-in, which is something I get asked about or asked to write about a lot. When you're starting that journey to implementation, regardless of what it is, how do you talk to those key stakeholders who you need to get on board in order to get started?

Marcucci: For us, it comes down to being able to show examples of where similar problems with other organizations have been solved through the particular approach that you're proposing. Again, that's why it's beneficial to use outside partners in a lot of cases, because if an internal organization is trying to get stakeholder buy-in for a particular initiative in a lot of cases the area where they may be able to pull those examples from is going to be limited to what that organization has done successfully or maybe what they've done in a previous role at another organization.

Being able to bring in an outside partner allows you to vastly increase the pool of possible areas, where you can show examples of similar solutions driving the right value for an organization. That's what most stakeholders are looking for. There's a limited budget and limited time, they need to be able to make decisions about where they're going to focus things. If they can increase their level of confidence that a particular solution is going to yield some level of success, you've gone really far away and are able to move the possibility of that initiative being successful. Getting underway, you've been able to increase that, so you have to show those areas of value.

The other thing is to try and break up any sort of initiative into its smallest components. If you're going to a stakeholder saying I've got a great idea: in 18 months you're going to have the greatest thing you've ever got thinking about. There's no way I'm waiting that long. If you can say, “invest in a team, give us three to six weeks to do a rapid product discovery phase that is going to allow us to do a lot of the thinking and identify what we think are the next best steps.” Then, from there the value will be insight into how the process works or what we think it's going to yield. That's a much easier request to make that. With a smaller price tag against it, that is going to potentially have a higher likelihood of being able to move forward. So make sure you're asking for things in the right volume because it's going to yield more positive outcomes.

“Know your audience, and know who you're talking to. Are you trying to convince the CFO? They want to know what it's going to lead to in terms of cost savings or new revenue, whatever that is. If you're talking to an operational person, know what they're trying to achieve and how, what you're proposing aligns to their goals?”
Elisabeth Bradley, Endava

Bradley: One of the things that I always think about goes back to the very simple things you learned in English class when you were writing a persuasive essay — know your audience, and know who you're talking to. Are you trying to convince the CFO? They want to know what it's going to lead to in terms of cost savings or new revenue, whatever that is. If you're talking to an operational person, know what they're trying to achieve and how, what you're proposing aligns to their goals? My job is to make my clients look good internally.

If that is the end goal for me, and that's the end goal for somebody who's trying to get a project moving through an organization that again, in many cases, a lot of these businesses are very old and have a lot of people that have been within their four walls for a very long time. There's different motivations and values that people hold, but knowing what the value and outcome will be achieved, which matters to those stakeholders, changes the game in terms of being able to talk people into doing what you think is the right thing to do.

Rajagopal: I heard that instead of failing fast, now they're saying learn fast. So when you were talking, that's what it reminded me of. What's something this audience needs to do today to build that foundation, something they need to have right now in order to prepare for the next big disruption? Maybe it's a process, a technology, we talked about robotics and payments and things like that. So three things we'll put a cap on, but what do they need to do right now to prepare for the next big disruption? Because we know it's coming.

Marcucci: For me it's about flexibility, building flexibility into the business. Flexibility can exist in a lot of different areas, but eventually, at the largest level, you want to make sure that you've built a business that has the flexibility from a business model standpoint to be able to pivot to whatever the next big disruption has forced the business into that lane. The way you build flexibility from a technology standpoint within businesses, is about building discrete components of business capability. Everyone talks about digital transformation as the end all be all, but that's so broad, I can't actually do anything with that. For me, it comes down to first wanting to build business capability from a technology standpoint, making sure all of your data across all of your systems is extensible and can talk with itself.

You can access it from several different points within your technology estate, that's business. That business capability is critical to flexibility down the road. Once you've built in enough business capability from a data and functional perspective, you then have the ability to start to more quickly assemble new products. Those new products are enabled by that business flexibility you have and by product that, if you're a CG company, it's going to be a product that's allowing your customers, or your customers' customers to interact and actually purchase those goods. If you build enough new products, new experiences based on that digital capability, then you have the flexibility to create your business model in a far broader sense. That's what we're recommending to our clients right now. Take the time to invest in the flexibility of the business at a fundamental technology level that will then give us all of the avenues of operation in the future so we can handle whatever is going to come down.

Bradley: On top of that, I would say data strategy, where it comes from, what it looks like, what you're going to do with it. You don't need to figure all of it out now, but to start down that path because especially in some larger organizations that have grown through acquisition or continue to grow through acquisition, there's disparate data sources, different functions for data, and that's across top to bottom finance, marketing product, etc. Figure out what that strategy is, and then take incremental steps towards achieving that strategy. Lean on that resilience that we've shown over the last year and say, it can be done. It can be done in incremental steps to build capability and it'll make the future a whole lot easier, and hopefully give the businesses the ability to be more predictive, more anticipatory. Then react when it happens because you will have some insight as to whether or not it's coming.

Marcucci: Well, one of the areas where we ask our clients to focus, if they're not sure where to start — depending upon their maturity as an organization from a digital standpoint — is to find the paper. Where in your process is there paper? Where does paper exist? It rarely exists at big core levels, but as you get further and further away from the core of a business function, a lot of times in organizations, there's still a piece of paper someplace, and let's remove those pieces of paper.

Let's talk about not the document or the paper, but the data that sits on that paper. Let's figure out a way to ingest that via machine learning or some sort of complicated ingestion, OCR, different process. Let's begin to take that paper, digitize it, remove it from the flow, and now you're in a process where you have all the requisite data to do something with that. You've removed something that is fundamentally a non-digital process, which could be a hindrance to your flexibility moving forward.

Bradley: I'm sure a number of people on this webinar today have a function that they deliver via Excel. Whether it's paper or financials, there's opportunity there. Find that. I hate the saying, “low hanging fruit,” but that gets you on the path to proving the value of digital initiatives and things like that.

Rajagopal: Size doesn't matter, it's companies big and small, as well. Thank you, Elisabeth and Justin for your expertise today, and thank you to Endava for sponsoring. Finally, I'd like to thank you all for your very valuable time to be with us today, and we hope you found it worthwhile. Enjoy the rest of your day.

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