Dr. Lal PathLabs -Driving Digital Transformation with Cloud
Dr. Lal PathLab has a national network of National Reference Laboratory in New Delhi, 170 clinical laboratories, 1,500+ patient service centers and over 5,000 pickup points. Its network is spread across India, including metropolitan areas such as New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata. With over 3000+ diagnostic and related healthcare tests and services, the company offers diagnostic healthcare services through its nationwide network of clinical laboratories, patient service centers and pickup points.
The company embarked on its digital journey two years ago and has successfully aligned it to its business goals.
Tell us about the digital journey at Dr. Lal Pathlabs
The leadership at Dr. Lal PathLabs were quick to feel the market pulse and identified digital strategy as a key lever to aid the next phase of growth. With changing consumer behaviour, the imperative was to have the right platform to engage with customer.
The digital journey was therefore triggered by two objectives. First was to ensure customer delight by engaging with the customer—facilitating easy access to our services, delivering online reports, query fulfilment and a range of related services. The other objective was to extend our reach to new customers—create demand for our services, engage and attract new customers to aid and abate business expansion.
We started on a clean slate. We started with a new team and I was the first hire. Gradually, we built the team with people from different skill sets to embark on the digital journey. The team comprises people with technical skills and good understanding of business requirements to align objectives of the organization with digital strategy.
What are the key factors to a successful digital strategy?
First, digital strategy should be embedded in the business vision. This means it needs the endorsement at the highest level as going digital requires major changes in systems, processes and way of thinking. At Dr. Lal PathLabs, digital vision is firmly embedded in business thinking and aligned with the organizational goals with the backing of management.
Second, speed and agility are the bedrock of a digital strategy. We needed to have a reliable and scalable infrastructure within a short time. Cloud-based infrastructure is best suited for digital strategy and we found AWS offered the best choices in terms of range and depth of services.
Considering the unpredictability involved in our digital campaigns we required flexible infrastructure which allowed us to scale up and down according to the traffic. AWS allowed us to use auto-scaling and automate a large part of the deployment allowing us to build a scalable and reliable deployment.
How can businesses differentiate with digital strategy?
Customer engagement completely changes in the digital world. Engagement is one-on-one basis allowing you intimate connect while you fulfil individual requirements and customize interactions. To be successful, this requires internal processes be aligned with your digital strategy.
Secondly, close and intimate customer interactions provides unique insights into customer requirements enabling to design innovative solutions.
In fact digital enables organizations to allow customers to participate and design new offerings and solutions collaboratively.
How can organizations keep pace with customer demand for new products and solutions?
This calls for close examination of organizational agility, and its ability to respond to customer demand. The includes an organization’s imperative for a scalable, flexible and reliable infrastructure which is not possible with traditional technology deployment. However, cloud-based infrastructure is a boon in this regard as organizations can avail resources instantly without going through lengthy procurement processes.
Once customer requirement is identified, organizations do not have the luxury to design and develop the perfect product. Instead organizations design skeletal products and roll out new solutions, honing it to perfection based on consumer feedback and continuous improvement. This not only engages the consumer but ensures that the organization is constantly updating and improving the solution. So digital helps organizations not only to engage with consumers but also be agile and responsive.
