Digital Strategy · Private Sector

Defining a digital ambition and roadmap for a leading steel and flow supplier

Overview

A leading steel and flow control supplier required support to define a clear digital ambition and strategic roadmap for the business to support its evolution and remain competitive.

Outcome

Achieved leadership alignment on digital transformation priorities through comprehensive research with 50+ employees and customers. Delivered a digital ambition and high-level implementation roadmap that shifted the organisation from technology-driven to evidence-based decision making, providing clear direction for future digital investments.

Impact

The digital ambition and roadmap now serve as guiding documents to inform decisions around investment, capability building, and sequencing, helping the client move forward with greater clarity, confidence, and cohesion in its digitisation journey.

My role

As the strategic designer in a team of four, I conducted stakeholder research and workshop facilitation to ensure digital strategy addressed genuine operational challenges. I designed research methodology, facilitated cross-sector stakeholder engagement, managed project timelines and deliverables, and synthesised insights into actionable strategic recommendations.

The Challenge

Digitisation urgency with unclear investment prioritisation

The organisation operates as a specialised distributor with 200+ employees across multiple New Zealand facilities, sourcing from 200+ global suppliers and serving major infrastructure projects nationwide. They were navigating rapid change from COVID-19 and internal consolidation. These pressures had shifted customer expectations and highlighted the need for digital transformation.

The client recognised digital transformation was critical to reducing costs, operational silos, and manual processes affecting efficiency. However, they lacked clarity on which digital opportunities would deliver the greatest impact, creating two significant challenges:

  1. Technology investments risked following industry trends rather than addressing real market needs without a clear understanding of where digital enablement would create the most value for their specific business context.

    For example: It was unclear whether digital portals and real-time tracking solutions would address the organisation's core operational challenges or deliver genuine business value.

  2. Limited visibility into customer and employee needs made it difficult to prioritise digital opportunities across different customer segments and internal operations.

    For example: Sales teams were quoting different lead times for the same products whilst customer service couldn't access real-time inventory, but the organisation needed to understand which pain points to address first and how digital solutions could systematically improve these experiences.

The brief focused on amplifying the customer and employee voice while helping the client identify digital opportunities across internal operations, customer engagement, and supply chain effectiveness. The engagement needed to align leadership, surface pain points and opportunities, and provide a strong foundation for digital investment and prioritisation.

Approach

* Images have been blurred intentionally to protect client confidentiality.

People First, Technology Second

We pursued a stakeholder-centred strategy development process across five key phases, ensuring the digital strategy would be grounded in operational reality rather than technology assumptions. Instead of starting with "what technology should we buy?", we started with "what do the people who actually use these systems need?"

Step 1: Understanding the market context

We began with discovery sessions with the client to understand the evolving competitive landscape and changing customer expectations. Competitors were investing heavily in digital portals and real-time tracking, raising expectations for seamless interactions. Leading suppliers were differentiating through digital efficiency, creating risk that digital-native competitors could erode traditional relationship advantages.

Together, we agreed on a stakeholder-centred approach to understand both internal and external perspectives within the broader market context before making technology decisions.

Step 2: Gathering insights from customers and staff

To validate assumptions and uncover actual market needs, we conducted extensive semi-structured interviews, surveys, and contextual inquiry with employees and customers across all sectors to understand current-state experiences, challenges, and unmet needs across internal operations and customer engagement.

Survey questions explored industry standards, supplier relationship factors, and digital capabilities that could provide competitive advantage. Contextual observation sessions revealed gaps between official processes and actual workflows, uncovering practical workarounds that pointed to high-impact digital opportunities.

Research synthesis and themes board

Step 3: Translating insights into opportunities

Our qualitative research and thematic analysis revealed how existing systems were creating friction across the organisation. Water sector clients explained they valued how competitors offered digital compliance certificates, saving them hours of manual documentation. Back office staff were managing manual processes that prevented real-time inventory visibility.

What emerged was an organisation where each department had developed its own workarounds to navigate system limitations. Workers had become skilled at managing these inefficiencies, but the cumulative effect was driving up costs and creating inconsistent customer experiences that created competitive disadvantages.

From these insights, we generated problem statements, opportunities, and potential initiatives that would address genuine operational challenges rather than theoretical improvements.

Step 4: Aligning on the future vision

Building on the problem statements and opportunities we had identified, we brought together the entire leadership team to define the organisation's future state digital ambition and build shared understanding of what success should look like. Leadership shared what they believed the problems and directions to be, whilst we shared our learnings from the research.

Together, we mapped the value of the problems and generated opportunities, then applied our three-dimensional scoring framework assessing each opportunity across staff impact, business value, and customer benefit. This systematic prioritisation helped us categorise opportunities into lights-on operations (essential functionality), table stakes requirements (industry standards), and true differentiators (competitive advantages), enabling us to align around a clear digital ambition focused on internal efficiency and external competitive advantage.

As part of the workshop, we introduced best-in-class case studies with a range of digital maturity - from very to some digitally enabled - to show the scale the company could aim for, inspiring thinking and anchoring ambition in practical examples.

Workshop with leadership team

Step 5: Creating the path forward

In the second workshop, we defined initiatives that directly linked with our prioritised opportunities and sequenced them based on interdependencies and organisational capacity to bridge current state challenges with future state goals. We conducted deep dives on each initiative to understand resource requirements, technical feasibility, and implementation timelines. This included defining success metrics and envisioning the 3-year future state.

This process resulted in 5 prioritised problems to solve, including inventory visibility challenges (lost identification tags and paper-based systems preventing real-time stock tracking), inconsistent customer experience (sales teams quoting different lead times for identical products), and manual process bottlenecks (paper pick sheets preventing just-in-time coordination).

We developed 6 workstreams for the roadmap across 12, 24, and 36-month horizons. This resulted in a comprehensive report that provided clear direction for digital investment priorities and implementation.

Workshop with leadership team

Deliverables

    • Digital ambition statement defining future state vision

    • 36-month implementation roadmap with 6 prioritised workstreams

    • Three-dimensional evaluation framework for ongoing opportunity assessment

    • Comprehensive research report with findings from all stakeholder interviews, surveys and contextual inquiry

    • Stakeholder engagement methodology for future strategic decision-making

    • Problem statements, opportunities, and initiative recommendations

    • High-level project briefs for each prioritised initiative

    • Indicative success metrics and governance frameworks

    • Approximate resource requirements and timeline milestones

Outcomes

Leadership confidence in digital direction

Replaced uncertainty about digital investment priorities with a clear strategic direction. Leadership gained confidence to make technology decisions based on validated stakeholder needs rather than industry trends or competitor activities.

Evidence-based decision-making culture established

Shifted organisational approach from assumption-driven planning to systematic evaluation using stakeholder insights. Teams now have the methodology and tools to assess future opportunities against actual operational requirements and market needs.

Operational inefficiencies transformed into strategic advantages

Converted departmental workarounds and manual processes into opportunities for competitive differentiation. The organisation can now distinguish between operational necessities and areas where digital investment can create genuine business value.

Learnings

Getting close to the frontline matters

The most valuable insights came from spending time with frontline workers. Warehouse staff's chalk markings on steel beams revealed exact gaps where digital solutions could deliver immediate value - insights that complemented what we learned from leadership discussions.

Leadership vision meets everyday reality

Combining leadership vision with operational understanding creates stronger strategy. Leadership brought strategic context and business priorities, while frontline staff revealed practical implementation opportunities - like when executives focused on competitive positioning whilst workers identified specific inventory visibility needs that would enable that positioning.

Real stories create real alignment

Bringing specific employee quotes and customer feedback to leadership workshops created shared understanding that connected strategic vision with operational reality. My role evolved from gathering insights to translating them into compelling narratives that aligned different perspectives around common goals.

Seeing the work, not just talking about it

Observing actual workflows alongside interviews provides the richest understanding. The physical reality of how work gets done reveals digital opportunities that complement the strategic insights from conversations, creating a more complete picture for decision-making.