PwC’s Semih Kumluk On How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level

As part of our series about “How To Use Digital Transformation To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Semih Kumluk.

Semih Kumluk is a well-versed leader with work experience in FMCG, Telecommunications, Consultancy and Training. He is leading the Data, Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation programs at PwC’s Academy Middle East. He won the Global Instructor of the Year Award in 2022.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I initially studied Chemical Engineering. During a Data Science interview, I literally said “data is the new oil and as a Chemical Engineer I know how to process oil very well. That’s why you should pick me.” I have a very diverse background hence I call myself a V-person rather than a T-person. I utilize combining my diverse background in almost any customer engagement I have or project I lead to apply my expertise in relevant areas. Being data literate in many topics and creating use cases from emerging technologies are some of the most important skills of our time.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

In my first role, we were working with a vendor during a project. We had the project team and we exchanged emails constantly including the external vendor. I was new at the time, and I didn’t know yet who was internal and who was external. When I replied to all in an email apparently, I had kept vendors as well and written some things about the vendor. Luckily, I didn’t write anything bad about them but since then I mostly avoid replying to all in and forwarding emails especially since written form of communication is open to misunderstanding. Personal touch and speaking is the best and covid taught us that again.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

I mentioned earlier that I have a diverse background and it wouldn’t have happened without the support of my managers. Most of my managers I report to — must have seen it in me — supported my ambitions to move different roles in order to achieve my career goals. I had won the Human Resources Professional of The Year award and was doing great with new innovative plans in HR Analytics, Employee Experience etc. One day my director asked me “How much do you think you are able to utilize your various skills in your current job?” I said “Well, not 100% but I am happy.” He mentored me about the importance of having commercial experience to get to the top in business and sponsored my move to Marketing. Many of managers did the same, I am grateful to them.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I read a lot of books that I loved and watched many more movies that both resonate with me. I think one of the most impactful was Paul Arden’s “It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be”. It’s an easy book to read, our university professor at the senior grade used to read couple pages every week. I learned a lot and applied about personal branding, leadership, and motivation. I started collecting quotes that I inspire me from the books, movies, figures I admire and finally I came up with my own quote book. I try to spend 10 minutes to read all the quotes in my notebook every morning, and when I do my mood changes instantly to get ready and be mindful for the challenges of the day. It now consists of 150+ quotes and counting.

Extensive research suggests that “purpose-driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?

Our vision is to land somewhere between “Making an impact” and “Changing lives”. We are an organization full of people who aspire to touch business professionals directly, teach them, upskill them and equip them with the necessary skills that they will use in their entire career. Knowing our graduates and alumni shine brighter and have bigger impact is priceless.

Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

I am constantly working on new digital upskilling programs to foster the development of our clients. I am currently focusing on the intersect of digital with business and leadership. It’s up to leaders and business professionals who will set the strategy and implement digital transformation, I am developing solutions to make these topics easy to grasp and achieve transformation.

Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about Digital Transformation. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly Digital Transformation means? On a practical level what does it look like to engage in a Digital Transformation?

The stemming word of Digital Transformation. In basic definition, it’s about converting everything we see around us into digits, digits that computers can understand. In more practical terms, it’s moving from manual processes to automation, utilizing emerging technologies and using the computer intelligence wherever it’s better and quicker than human intelligence. It has three pillars, technology, processes, and people. The companies can set a strategy to use artificial intelligence to optimize their supply chain operations, Blockchain to share information between their multinational branches and headquarters, Internet of Things and start collecting data from their machines and Virtual Reality to train their employees. It’s also about simple examples such as converting customer registration forms in banks into digital forms that they can sign on a tablet, real time dashboards instead of monthly static reports. After setting the strategy to utilize a technology, next step is to define the processes that will be converted to digital. Organizations need detailed mapping of their current processes and the opportunity analysis that how this process will be performed by using the technology. People of course is the essential part of achieving transformation from start to end.

Which companies can most benefit from a Digital Transformation?

Any company can benefit from Digital Transformation. The ones which have a lot of manual processes would be open to improve their productivity and efficiency the most by implementing some automation solutions. Also, data is the common denominator of all the emerging technologies to be implemented in the process to achieve digital transformation. Hence companies with good data infrastructures have a head start advantage when it comes to quick technology implementation and reaping the benefits of digital transformation.

We’d love to hear about your experiences helping others with Digital Transformation. In your experience, how has Digital Transformation helped improve operations, processes and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.

In my previous company, we had many digital projects in the Human Resources department. One of my favorite was to move from static yearly employee surveys to real time data. It would be overwhelming to send employees weekly surveys to collect data, but we aimed to utilize the cameras across the office to check the emotions of the employees real time. The purpose of the project was to monitor and improve employee experience before I left the company. At PwC, we help a lot of clients to achieve transformation. There are a lot of processes in finance and accounting departments which are open to automation. Any process in which you can define the steps one by one and those steps which require no or low human judgment are good targets for automation. By delegating these kinds of manual work to machines, finance and accounting professionals focus on value adding things.

Has integrating Digital Transformation been a challenging process for some companies? What are the challenges? How do you help resolve them?

Many organizations forget “people” in the digital transformation equation and that’s why transformation efforts fail. This is our focus area. We bring the attention of our clients to the people aspect of transformation. Organizations focus on building the infrastructure, purchasing tools, investing in data but the employees don’t use them. We instill the mindset, knowledge, and skills so that the employees embrace the transformation goals and implement them across the organization.

Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Use Digital Transformation To Take It To The Next Level”?

1. What you don’t measure, you can’t control. What you don’t control, you cannot improve. Many digital transformation programs include dashboards. Dashboard for two purposes. First, to track the KPIs set to achieve by implementing the pillars of digital transformation. Two, to reach to the necessary level of data quality which is a prerequisite of all technologies to be implemented.
2. Automation has great potential for almost any business department to automate mundane tasks such as payroll in HR, invoice recording in accounts receivable, admin tasks etc. Automation should be a key part of the digital transformation strategy. Organization should create awareness in the employees and should hire or upskill automation developers so they can quickly transform manual processes.
3. Although an obvious example, moving customer services digital helps improve customer experience to great extent. A simple app, now with embedded chatbots and other capabilities reduce the time to serve and solve issues of customers. The digital platforms such as apps also help collect customer transactions data.
4. Data. Digital Transformation efforts should also focus on generating insights from the data. There are many creative ways to collect data for a given project. Especially social media data, IoT data and similar high frequency big data analyzed by artificial intelligence algorithms help companies understand the behavior and needs of their customers so they can offer what they might like proactively.
5. Simple but powerful, digital transformation efforts should also aim to remove any paperwork, this will help companies achieve their ESG goals as well which is becoming a requirement for many industries. Paperwork for registration, for reports, for authentication etc. should and could be eliminated. This kind of paperwork is open to errors when recording the information to computers and also limits companies collect more data. Any paper form can easily be converted into a digital form which people can fill by scanning a QR code. On the other hand this would improve the customer experience by fastening the processes.

In your opinion, how can companies best create a “culture of innovation” in order to create new competitive advantages?

I believe in Citizen Lead Innovation and how it fosters a culture of innovation. After setting the strategy and direction, leaders should inspire and create awareness in everyone in the organization. Design Thinking is a great methodology to have the structured approach to innovation rather than get lost in the process. With the required combination of mindset, knowledge, and skills across the organization; employees are the best people to come up with innovative ideas regarding their own responsibilities. Then necessary processes should be in place to incentivize employees to come up with and implement innovative ideas. Intrapreneurship programs, bootcamps and uses of business model canvas are some of the examples I benefited from and recommended to my clients.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“A candle never loses any of its light while lighting up another.” — Rumi

Sharing my experience, knowledge, passion, and vision with others always fueled me pursue my goals and eventually I ended up in the training business.

How can our readers further follow your work?

I am highly active on LinkedIn and share on digital transformation and artificial intelligence regularly, they can follow my profile.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!