DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION BY
CONNECTING BEST-IN-CLASS
ERP SOFTWARE WITH A
GLOBAL TRADING PLATFORM
Our customer in the floriculture sector wanted to transform from a local and physical Dutch auction facilitator to a global online full-service trading platform. A company-wide digital transformation program was initiated to develop and connect new online services. As part of this digital transformation, new back-office systems were implemented (SAP S/4, SAP Ariba, Dynamics 365 CRM, Planon) and hundreds of custom applications were moved to the AWS cloud.
KEY CHALLENGES
- From custom-made product thinking to
best-practice standards and design principles - Transition from an organically grown way of
working to a service driven agile workforce - Align conflicting priorities and timelines
CUSTOMER CHALLENGES
This migration had very ambitious goals putting a lot of pressure on the project.
Key Challenges Included:
- Cultural change: from custom-made
product thinking to design principles for best-practice standards and the latest available technology; - Way-of-working: transition from organically grown legacy (core) applications based on detailed business specifications to a service
driven agile way of working; - Align conflicting priorities and timelines: manage stakeholders across a front-end platform roadmap (focused on improved time-to-market) and a back-end technology transition (focused on lower total cost of ownership).
DELIVERABLES
Our engagement started with rationalization of the IT application portfolio, followed by harmonization and standardization of the business processes and connecting best-in-class ERP software with a global trading platform. The engagement resulted in the following value to the digital transformation:
- Enabling the business to manage its product portfolio based on technology driven market insights.
- Decouple front-end and back-end development to support flexibility in business demand.
- Centralizing and commoditizing application migrations and integrations for an agile and efficient IT organization
OUR CONTRIBUTION TO SUCCESS
A successful deployment of the digital transformation was a result of not just focusing on technical details and data migration, but also on training and communication. To mitigate business continuity risks, a clear governance was set up to immediately address any issue during the entire digital transformation. According to our holistic approach, the deployment was successful by balancing the three key areas People, Process and Platform across all deployment activities.