Playing your cards right: A story of digital transformation
A friend of mine in India has a playing card manufacturing business. They are part of a large international company, one of their customers is a casino in Macau. They have 10% of the business, the balance is with a Japanese company. The differentiator is quality. My friend’s group had been working hard on reducing their defective rate.
At a meeting at the casino, the buyer told them that their defect rate was now at 6-7 packs in 10 million. The team was mighty pleased to hear that. Till they were told that the Japanese company’s defect rate was 1 in 100 million!
It was now obvious that they had no chance in beating the Japanese on quality. What were they to do?
The group had recently started an innovation centre, the team took the Macau problem to them.
In a few months, the team went back to the casino with a proposition: they would install digital printing machines at the casino and print the playing cards on site and each pack would be unique. The proposal was met with great enthusiasm, and the team is in the process of installing the first digital machine.
This story reminded me of what David Rogers of Columbia Business school told us: “Digital transformation is NOT about technology. It’s about strategy, leadership and new ways of thinking.”
This story is a classic case of thinking differently. Coming up with a solution that made the existing evaluation criteria irrelevant and established a new norm which will now make the dominant competitor play catch up.
Suprio is a partner at Accelero. We deliver growth ideas, tested for market fit, at speed.