Stop repeatedly replacing your IT systems
This article is written in cooperation with Incentro
Much is happening in the (retail) market, and this affects all kinds of business processes. When dealing with an IT landscape that does not facilitate flexibility and speed, it will affect your position in the market. Because your IT system is not able to react to the changing management requirements fast enough. So, every 5 to 10 years the IT systems, such as ERP, WMS and TMS, require a major update or they are even completely replaced. Large projects, that sometimes take years and cost millions. The repeated replacement of your IT systems hinders the growth of the company. But you have no alternative. Or do you?
In this blog, together with Incentro, we will explain how you can become more flexible and how you can select a system that never needs to be replaced and which perfectly supports your business processes.
IT in retail: the current situation
The world is changing fast: pressure on gas and energy prices, raw material shortages, geopolitical shifts, wars and much more. You want to be able to adapt to these challenges. Retailers that are not able to adapt, find themselves in difficulties far sooner than companies that can adapt. Adaptability is therefore essential to be able to survive in a changing world with increasing customer demands, which the business is all too aware of. They want to react faster and more flexibly to the market and they turn to IT for a solution.
The biggest problem for every IT department
Incentro recognized such a problem at one of their customers: the pricing process was adjusted every quarter based on extensive Excel worksheets full of purchase, sales and margin prices. Until recently it was sufficient to revise these prices once a quarter, but today's challenges call for weekly revisions. This takes far too much time and is extremely error sensitive. Preferably you want a smart pricing module that accelerates this process for you. But you cannot (quickly) deliver this with your current system.
The major problem? An IT landscape that does not evolve. Despite migrations and new versions that you implement every 5 to 10 years, your IT system becomes outdated time and time again. We observe at many customers that they continue to convert their current IT systems to a newer version. For IT managers and CIOs it has become perfectly normal to invest a lot of money and time every five years in an upgraded version of their current system.
Working towards a solution
This is no longer the case with the Thinkwise Platform. Why? Because a core system built with this platform never becomes outdated. Think of it as a 3D-printer that prints a smarter, newer 3D-printer, without requiring a migration or upgrade. New features are added with each iteration and feedback from users are implemented. It is a one-time investment that continues to repay itself, because the budget that you normally spend on a new system, can now be spent on new features, applications and other innovations. This not only ensures that you can answer questions from the business much faster, but also allows you to evolve with them as the market changes. Challenges and innovations that come your way are no longer obstacles, but opportunities.
Replace your outdated system in the near future
We work together with Incentro and guide retail companies during their migration to Thinkwise systems. Incentro recommends at the start of a migration to begin with the most important process, and then increasingly add more processes. Both with an application that is not very complex and one that takes away a lot of pain. You can continue to build on this initial start, whereby increasingly larger components of your application landscape will become flexible. So you quickly go through all the steps and little by little you create a core system with the associated applications that never again become legacy. In this way you build a system that will never again need replacing.