80% of Digital Transformation Projects Miss Their Goal — Here's Why

In this episode of Rozmowy Logistyków, Piotr Skobało and Adam Sobolewski discuss the digital supply chain in a still very analog reality. Drawing on McKinsey statistics, they explain why as many as 80% of digital transformations in logistics end in failure.

TRANSFORMATION ISN'T AUTOMATION

Quoting MIT researcher George Westerman: digital transformation means introducing new technology in a way that enables a radical improvement in business results — not a few percent more, but a jump of tens of percent, or a move into an entirely new operating model. Automation is something else: improving a single, repeatable piece of a process. An example of a real transformation: a team of under 10 people running a planning system did half the work that over 90 people did at a comparable company in the same corporate group — because the level at which the work happened changed entirely, not just the speed of work at the old level.

THE BUSINESS LEADS, IT SUPPORTS

The most common mistake: handing ownership of the project to the IT department, which then starts deciding on its own what the company "should" deploy. The proven model runs the other way — the business defines the need ("I need to raise picking process productivity by 30%," "I need to handle twice the sales volume"), and IT selects the technology to match. Without a specific business goal at the outset, it's hard to later measure whether the project succeeded, and hard to build a credible business case for the board — that requires someone from the business to take ownership of a specific number (e.g. cutting cost by X% within two years), not just of deploying a system.

THE TRANSFORMATION TEAM: SPONSOR, BUSINESS OWNER, DELIVERY TEAM

A project run by a warehouse manager with no mandate from the board has low odds of success — you need a sponsor at decision-making level, a clear business owner of the goal, and a delivery team with real participation from operational people, not just IT. Equally crucial is engaging influential informal leaders — leaving them out can be costly, as in a WMS deployment at a logistics operator where warehouse managers sabotaged the project because they understood it as an announcement of layoffs, while the board was thinking about supporting additional locations under one system — a communication disconnect nobody addressed at the start.

THIS IS CHANGE MANAGEMENT, NOT AN IT PROJECT

A rigorous, fact-based assessment of the organization's current state (who the informal leaders are, what the process's real challenges are) has to come before choosing a solution — otherwise even good technology gets aimed at a poorly diagnosed problem. External consultants (McKinsey and similar firms) can help plan the strategy and support the rollout, but they can't replace internal understanding and buy-in — an organization that wants to "buy itself success" by outsourcing the entire transformation loses before it even starts.

FIVE STEPS: GOAL, TEAM, KPIs, TECHNOLOGY, MONITORING

The practical sequence: define the business goal and ambitious, measurable KPIs; build the right transformation team with a clear division of roles; only then choose the technology matched to the goal, not the other way around; and after deployment, monitor, adapt, and maintain the relationship with technology partners. Skipping any of these steps, especially the first two, is the most common reason digital ambitions end in analog disappointment.