Digital transformation can only happen in packaging supply companies when the promise of enhanced operational performance, lower costs and boosted client loyalty are fully recognized and understood by the business leadership team.

Backed by evidence from interviews with hundreds of customers, the recently launched Esko Digital Maturity Model proposes that business leaders have varying levels of concern around a number of factors including innovation, growth, production quality, timeliness of supply, environmental sustainability and equipment effectiveness. This variability of leadership focus is now understood to directly corrolate with what level of digital maturity the business will reach.

In the REACTIVE stage of the Esko digital maturity model, leaders tend to be very hands-on, deadline driven, continually cost cutting and seeking to please customers by mostly firefighting offline and manual tasks.

In the OPTIMIZED stage, defined processes emerge and leaders embrace teamwork and recognition, as well as begin to place more focus on customer collaboration, quantifying environmental performance and adding KPIs to the business to drive performance.

As we move into DIGITIZED, leaders are motivational in style. They embrace technology and create strategic programmes to boost customer loyalty. They drive dashboard adoption to deliver metrics to manage timeliness and integrate continuous improvement in to company daily activities.

At the CONNECTED stage, leaders now become IT-centric thinkers with continuous improvement front of mind. They are innovation-driven seeking standardization of process wherever they can and see reliability and flexibility as key business differentiators, along with environmental sustainability.

Finally, the manager who creates the INTELLIGENT business is a digital transformation leader. This individual has digital strategy embedded in the company vision and technology is core to business operations and investment planning. They have a right-first time ethos, backed with quality inspection feedback loops, as well as best in class overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). Their proactive data driven world now operates with advanced autonomous capabilities unseen previously.

To discover your stage of digital maturity as a business, take the test!