Even though we live in a highly disruptive world, not everyone is ready to embrace the change. Some businesses refuse to invest in technology because, for them, innovation is not a matter of survival. Take monopolist companies that are used to doing business the traditional way without worrying about the smaller competitors trying to undermine them. But is ignoring innovation a good strategy in this day and age? Can businesses really afford to stay away from advanced technologies and automation? Read on to find out.
What Companies Lose When They Don’t Innovate
We are used to thinking that innovation is all about growth and that, with its help, companies will achieve higher economic value. It’s time to talk about the hidden cost of falling behind on automation and technology disruption.
Innovation is not about how much you save or make; it’s about how much you lose when you’re ignoring it.
Think about this for a moment: how many deals does your sales department fail to close in a quarter because legal is the bottleneck? How many goods spoil or are stacked in the warehouse because distribution is suboptimal? How many potential customers don’t know about your product because you use outdated marketing tools? Legacy operations, workflow bottlenecks, outdated tech tools are just some of the things you may be struggling with if you don’t innovate.
On top of that, for many businesses, not investing in innovation means losing their market share. Because, like it or not, digital-savvy competitors are already outperforming traditional companies and will continue to do that. In fact, half of the S&P 500 will be replaced in the next ten years. Also, if you don’t innovate, you risk shrinking your profit and earnings.
Companies that don’t invest in AI technologies will lose around 20% of cash flow by 2030 compared with today.
Solving Problems with Innovations
There are two approaches to innovation: you can innovate by investing in emerging digital businesses, or you can use digitalization and automation to transform your existing business operations. Let’s take a closer look at the latter one.
Innovation can help established companies optimize their legal, business and administrative processes. Thanks to advanced technologies, you can identify waste and inefficient areas that pull your company back. What’s more, you can eliminate bottlenecks and manage the routine work better through automation. Here are three cases of successful technology adoption by AXDRAFT customers and how it helped companies to deal with their internal challenges.
Legal Process Optimization with AXDRAFT
- A major international banking group with a presence in 77 countries decided to automate drafting of all its commercial procurement contracts. Including lease, supply, construction, services and etc. Thanks to AXDRAFT, the customer reduced the drafting time per contract to less than 7 minutes. Also, with our technology, the number of documents that have typos, errors or follow an outdated template dropped to less than 1%. The contracts drafting process was fully delegated to non-legal teams. Next goal is the automation of all loan and financial leasing processes.
- The largest poultry producer in Europe with 1.3 BLN market cap decided to automate the basic corporate documents (PoAs, secretary certificates, etc.) for subsidiaries. AXDRAFT analyzed the existing corporate documents and developed an automated Q&A drafting process. Today, with our help, the company’s lawyers spend less than four minutes to draft a document. They also automated all their commodity trading agreements, removing legal review as a bottleneck for trading operations, which allowed to close more deals in a quarter.
- An international CPG company had difficulty optimizing their claim processing process. The company’s lawyers spent 70% of their time drafting minor contract claims to logistic vendors. Remarkably, AXDRAFT allowed to fully automate the process and delegate this work to non-legal teams. Now, the company’s legal department can focus on higher value add work, and there is no need for new hires.
Innovation is Necessary
According to McKinsey’s survey, only 4% of executives don’t define innovation as their strategic priority. Because everyone knows that ignoring innovation can cost you big money. Today, not keeping up with technologies equals losing clients, time, profit and market share. Yes, innovation may not be a matter of survival for your company just yet. But in five or ten years, it sure will be. The truth is, even large corporations with fixed routines and traditional approaches to business can’t stay out of the innovation race. Studies confirm that innovative competitors are sure to leave them behind.
So, if you want to get rid of the productivity bottlenecks and boost your company’s efficiency, go for innovative solutions. And in case your company needs to automate and streamline the process of drafting routine documents, you can get help from AXDRAFT. We know everything about document automation and legal process optimization.