How can you digitally transform your company? Which areas are affected by digital transformation, and how far can you go with it? Whether your focus is on end customers, business clients, or your own employees, there are many ways to digitally enhance your processes, products, and services.
Have you already been thinking about digital transformation within your company or are planning a project but unsure where to start—or how far to go? What are some concrete examples of digital transformation, and which business areas does it touch? In this first article, I aim to provide a starting point: to outline the scope of digital transformation, share examples across various industries, and highlight what you should keep in mind.
My colleague has already written about the fundamentals of digital transformation, including the conditions that must be met for a transformation to succeed.
In this article, I’d like to focus on case studies and illustrate different ways of thinking about digital transformation. I’ll explore the success factors of transformation and present various transformation opportunities—without claiming to be exhaustive. Think of this as a thought-starter or compass. For me, digital transformation can span different dimensions:
- In the B2C space (end customers)
- In B2B relationships (business clients)
- And the often-overlooked internal digital transformation—your employees.
What Defines a Digital Transformation?
When thinking of digital transformation, common buzzwords likely come to mind: digital collaboration, data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), or Industry 4.0. And you’d be right—these are among the most prevalent implementation areas.
Many successful case studies revolve around using data obtained through apps like e-commerce platforms. But let’s go a step further and examine how fashion retailers are rethinking the combination of analog and digital. In these cases, classic brick-and-mortar stores merge seamlessly with e-commerce channels, creating an integrated mobile customer experience—for example, the Nike Digital Retail Experience (demodern.com). The focus here is not just data usage, but the overall customer experience. Tech-savvy customers—used to navigating the digital world—can be better attracted and retained (see also Henriette, Emily et al., Digital Transformation Challenges, 2016).
A Seamless Customer Experience
Nike offers a great example of B2C digital transformation. At its Berlin flagship store, Nike created a digital shopping experience: A digital kiosk allows football fans to discover, customize, and order their favorite Nike team gear. The kiosk is directly linked to both the store’s ERP system and the e-commerce platform, displaying real-time availability for in-store and online purchase. Online purchases are completed via the customer’s smartphone, while in-store purchases are accelerated through direct checkout integration. Terminal analytics help optimize stock levels, expand the available assortment, and improve space utilization.
To further appeal to digital natives, Nike also launched a mobile shopping app that works via the shop’s captive Wi-Fi portal. This creates a new dimension of digital experience—for example, completing purchases via smartphone or accessing extra content by simply shaking the phone.
A multimedia wall rounds out the immersive experience, showcasing campaigns, products, and live social media content from Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube—including football team rankings and scores. Customers can transfer this content to their phones and even leave a digital footprint by posting a selfie with a branded hashtag.
This example illustrates key components of digital transformation in the B2C space: social media integration, digital interaction, and data-driven efficiency.
The Global Data Brewery
AB InBev, the world’s largest brewing group, began its transformation by standardizing its complex global ERP landscape, followed by the harmonization of data and analytics systems across its sites. To enable this, the company established an Enterprise Data Hub (EDH) that supports various reporting, analytics, and data science use cases.
A core principle of their new architecture? Cloud-first. This decision was driven by massive data volumes and the need to eliminate data silos. AB InBev laid out a three- to five-year roadmap, though mission-critical applications remain on-premise for security reasons.
With this unified data view, AB InBev can:
- Optimize demand forecasting
- Implement predictive maintenance globally
- Detect fraud
- Analyze social media trends
Virtual Training Worlds
Walmart is often cited as a digital pioneer—and not just in retail operations. The company has also digitally transformed employee training.
After introducing self-checkout stations, Walmart retrained former cashiers using virtual reality programs to become personal shopping assistants. Today’s customers spend less time in physical stores, so when they do visit, their experience needs to be memorable—making well-trained staff even more critical.
In these VR simulations, employees are exposed to various real-world scenarios:
- How should they respond if a product is out of stock?
- How should they assist customers with physical disabilities or other challenges?
These “beyond-the-routine” scenarios require different training approaches to prepare employees for their evolving roles as in-store advisors.
Key Takeaways
In nearly all these digital transformation examples, the collection, structuring, storage, and analysis of data play a central role. Before blockchain and AI became trending topics, big data and analytics dominated the digital transformation discourse—soon followed by machine learning. These themes continue to be core enablers of digital transformation.
As already mentioned, delivering clean, usable data is a fundamental task when embarking on a transformation. But the human factor must not be overlooked—whether it’s the end customer (Nike) or your employees (Walmart). The digital maturity of these key players is critical. From experience, we know that honest self-assessment is hard—but crucial for long-term success. Investing in building digital skills is one of the most important success factors.
But perhaps the most essential takeaway is this: transformation must be viewed holistically. Every part of the organization plays a role:
- Business units must adopt new processes and provide data.
- Technology teams must deliver the tools and infrastructure to enable new experiences.
- And employees must use these tools and processes efficiently to create value and focus on new, more impactful tasks enabled by digitalization.
