Digitalising family businesses and SMEs

Digital transformation concerns all types of companies, including SMEs and family-run businesses. We are with you, all along your journey towards digital transformation.

Grab the future with both hands. Your hands.

Digital transformation is pushing many SMEs and family businesses to think about how they can lead their businesses into the future without relinquishing their traditional values. Count on us throughout your company’s digitalisation journey. Find out how you can reinvent yourself and stay true to who you are at the same time.

Cybersecurity assessment and strategy

Is your SME or family business safe in the event of a cyber-attack? Our holistic cybersecurity assessment unearths the flaws in your system.

All industries and all businesses are affected by the digital transformation, and so is your SME or family business. The digital transformation offers never-before-seen opportunities, but also comes with risks and challenges. We are there to help you to fine-tune the cyber strategy of your business with utmost precision. Count on our support on your digital journey. Every step of the way.

This is how we do it

Your cybersecurity transformation begins with a holistic and independent analysis of your security programmes and safety regulations and their handling.

Our experts thoroughly screen your cybersecurity programmes, assess the current situation with respect to the target state. Benefit from our cybersecurity framework, a comprehensive and flexible method for the development, implementation, communication and maintenance of a company-wide cybersecurity programme. It is based on a mixture of ISO and NIST industry standards, as well as our practical experience.

Understand

Read up on the strategy and guidelines of your global cybersecurity programme and understand them. Identify your «crown jewels», in other words, the systems and data that are critical to your business. Are you aware of the potential damage a cyber-attack can do to your company?

Evaluate

Assess what the loopholes are today and in the future in the event of a cyber-attack. Conduct a gap analysis of your status quo and target state. Analyse the current risks, and define the desired target state.

Decide

To increase your cybersecurity maturity, we define with you the suitable course of action and the necessary resources.

Please check under the heading Cyber Attack & Readiness Evaluation for a standardised possibility to conduct a cybersecurity assessment.

«Cyber risks constitute a substantial part of today’s business risks. Our experts screen your security programmes and pinpoint how you can most effectively invest your cybersecurity budget.»

Urs Küderli, Leader Cybersecurity, Strategy and Transformation, PwC Switzerland

How you benefit

Analysis

We assess the current security situation as well as the security gaps of your SME or family business and predict what impact these cybersecurity capability gaps may have on your company.

Recommendations

Our recommendations to you will include ways you can close the identified security gaps and embed them into a comprehensive security programme that perfectly suits your SME or family business.

Implementation

We support you all the way through your transformation and the implementation of specific and actionable cybersecurity initiatives to successfully digitalise your company.

User experience review

What is it like to do business with you? An independent, comprehensive analysis reveals it all.

Digitalisation gives cardinal importance to how SMEs and family-run businesses interact with their customers and their range of services. A user experience review clearly discloses, how your clients perceive doing business with you. Fact-based and relying on real user experiences, it will answer the following questions:

How do your customers interact with you?
What are your touch points and pain points?
How consistent are you when interacting with your customers?
Do you rely on best practices?

In order to digitally transform your company and improve your user experience, you need to thoroughly understand the idiosyncrasies, the context, and the behavioural patterns of your target groups. Our user experience review unearths how your customers use your products and services, and it reveals where there is room for improvement.

This is how we do it

Our experts assess the quality of your customers’ user experience. They uncover inconsistencies and issues and support you in creating the perfect customer journey. We apply a wide range of methods in order to identify your target groups’ user experience and outline their requirements:

web analyses
online polls

mystery shopping and usability testing
journey mapping

data analytics
benchmarking

«You can only improve your customers’ user experience, if you know precisely what their requirements are. With our help you can eliminate all the flaws in the way you interact with your customers.»

Robert Ballantine, Advisory Partner, PwC Switzerland

Immersion Session

Are you ready for tomorrow? Let us collaborate on new ideas and strategies to speed up your digital transformation.

An Immersion Session at PwC’s Experience Center may be a crucial step for your SME or family business towards a digital future. Immersion Sessions are innovation workshops where we develop new ideas and solutions in collaboration with you, where we tap into new technologies and create new values. This collaboration promotes a dialogue that yields tangible results and hands-on approaches for your digital transformation in no time. Ideas and strategies are prioritised and prototypes are tested on real customers, so that they can be steadily improved.

This is how we do it

Our approach is holistic. In their search for digital strategies, companies usually have to resort to several parties such as advisers, digital creative agencies, designer and software companies. PwC’s Experience Center is all that in one, as all our experts are in-house. Such proximity significantly reduces your coordination efforts and costs.

«Disruptive technologies turn traditional value chains upside down. Customer requirements take on an entirely new meaning, and a new degree of relevance. We develop solutions for such a new environment in collaboration with our customers.»

Jörg Thews, Insurance Advisory Leader, PwC Switzerland

How you benefit

An innovation workshop answers your questions about your digital future. It uncovers your challenges and opportunities, and it reveals how you can best implement your visions and strategies.

Get ready for the future in five simple steps:

1. Define the challenge

define the session agenda and activities, desired answers, outcomes and outputs for the session. (3-4 weeks prior to session)

2. Gather insights

before you can seek new ways, you will have to pinpoint your customers’ needs. We help you to ask the right questions. (3-4 weeks prior to session)

3. Immersion Session / Innovation Workshop

there are no boundaries and no restrictions. Together we will put forward new ideas and concepts. The most promising will be prioritised, formulated and refined. (1-2 weeks post session)

4. Build prototypes

ideas that result from an Immersion Session are converted into prototypes. (1-2 weeks post session)

5. Validate and refine

get feedback from real users in order to validate what your customers think about your ideas. Then present your refined prototype to your most relevant stakeholders. (1-2 weeks post session)

Intelligent automation with Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Do your employees have time for what is really important? Let your SME and family business get the best of automation.

Do you associate the term automation with the digitalisation of processes and Robotic Process Automation (RPA)? You are not far off, but automation is much more than that. Automation enables you to understand the cost drivers, to produce larger quantities much more rapidly and achieve numbers of scale.

Intelligent automation also helps you to take the right decisions and it addresses a multitude of challenges and opportunities in your daily business. Optimise with us your entire end-to-end value chain and boost your SME or family business. Happier and more loyal customers included.

This is how we do it

We employ data analyses, RPA, AI and the latest modelling techniques to thrust you to a new level of process quality.

Process mining

We scrutinise your data. By analysing your process data, you get a picture of how well your processes really work and how they can be optimised.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

RPA reproduces human actions at user interface level, which makes for rapid and cost-efficient automation of business processes.

Business Process Management (BPM)

Our digital front-end applications deliver high process flexibility and enable users to interact with automated solutions.

«Intelligent automation makes your processes more efficient and effective. It frees your talents from routine tasks so they can apply their brainpower to the company’s transformation. That’s incredibly important for SMEs, as their resources are often limited, but their workforce is agile and broadly-qualified.»

Zack Tian, Director Data & Analytics, Intelligent Automation, PwC Switzerland

SMEs and AI – your new work mate

New technologies, such as AI are the backbone of intelligent automation and tailored to your SME and family business.

Feel

Cognitive AI: our automated solutions have the ability to recognise and assess situations thanks to AI.

Decide

Machine learning: enables our automated solutions to take decisions.

Behaviour

Interaction between human beings and computers: new technologies such as chatbots enable our automated solutions to behave like human beings.

How you benefit

Your benefit

Lower costs, higher profit Intelligent automation projects redeem themselves within 1 to 2 years on average, and are potentially highly cost-efficient.