Modernising Legacy Supply Chain Systems
The pace of change in manufacturing, distribution and retailing has been increasing rapidly in order to support international expansion, while in the face of a wide variety of external challenges.
Uncertain economic conditions are presenting CIOs with an almost impossible task: How to transform IT in order to meet the business’s constantly changing and evolving needs while staying within budget, ensuring projects are delivered successfully, and proving new systems have a lower TCO for the ongoing business.
This challenge is made more complicated because so many companies are tied into big investments in legacy systems. These behemoths resist change and are so ingrained in the business that the prospect of modernising or replacing them can be daunting from an implementation effort standpoint and challenging from a cost justification perspective.
There are however a number of compelling reasons why a business should consider upgrading its legacy systems.
The first is the increasing cost of maintaining legacy systems, which includes the expense of supporting code in which a system has been written and developed and now supported by a reduced pool of resources or requires significant management effort trying to de-risk the application from end of life technology stacks and further customisation.
There are also businesses that have grown through mergers or acquisitions. Typically in these types of organisation, there are huge, complex IT infrastructures with many disparate and loosely integrated systems. There is little standardisation and optimisation, the cost of maintaining such a web of systems is enormous and when new functionality is needed, a tremendous effort is required to add new functionality and get multiple systems working together.
Additionally, in this new era of multi-channel commerce, companies are being forced to re-think their whole approach to the way they run their business operations. Most legacy systems are simply not built to deal with online trading let alone omnichannel commerce and the flexibility and scalability needed to support this. Finally, IT solutions today may need to encompass embrace trends in technology, ie social networking, cloud, mobile, and increased security demands and this is hard with older technologies.
FOCUSING ON MODERNISING
Whilst many companies have replaced their legacy systems managing processes such as finance, HR and manufacturing with an ERP system in the last 10 years, less attention has been given to replacing the legacy systems that manage supply chain processes. However, this has started to change, as the benefits associated with modernising legacy systems continue to surface.
As companies have come to view their supply chain as a strategic asset and are employing their supply chain today as a competitive weapon, CIOs of such organisations are looking increasingly at upgrading their legacy supply chain systems.
Most companies have traditionally relied on either: an assembly of supply chain solutions, which is a disparate set of supply chain solutions that never fully leveraged each other; or a suite of supply chain solutions, which is a set of related applications from a single vendor
but built on disparate technologies and with limited cross-functional workflow capabilities.
Migrating solutions in a suite to become solutions that share a common process platform (date, objects, workflows, common services, security etc) requires a significant investment of time and money that few vendors have been willing to make.
However a platform-based supply chain solutions portfolio that has crossfunctional awareness means changes made in one part of the supply chain are transmitted to other processes that need them. This allows information, assets and capabilities to be harnessed in ways previously not possible to help companies build profit and market advantage.
It not only means IT Directors and CIOs can now exchange their legacy supply chain system components for supply chain systems that are best in class, functionally rich, flexible, scalable and interoperable with their other systems, it also means they can invest in supply chain systems that are constantly evolving and future-proof.
Against a backdrop of continuous change, an increasingly volatile and global economy, and the arrival of the omni-channel selling world, companies need to have high levels of agility in their supply chain. A platform-based approach to running supply chain systems gives organisations the ability to fully optimise their supply chain processes as well as an approach that lowers the overall cost of technology ownership and subsequently helps maximise ROI - Logasia.
Uncertain economic conditions are presenting CIOs with an almost impossible task: How to transform IT in order to meet the business’s constantly changing and evolving needs while staying within budget, ensuring projects are delivered successfully, and proving new systems have a lower TCO for the ongoing business.
This challenge is made more complicated because so many companies are tied into big investments in legacy systems. These behemoths resist change and are so ingrained in the business that the prospect of modernising or replacing them can be daunting from an implementation effort standpoint and challenging from a cost justification perspective.
There are however a number of compelling reasons why a business should consider upgrading its legacy systems.
The first is the increasing cost of maintaining legacy systems, which includes the expense of supporting code in which a system has been written and developed and now supported by a reduced pool of resources or requires significant management effort trying to de-risk the application from end of life technology stacks and further customisation.
There are also businesses that have grown through mergers or acquisitions. Typically in these types of organisation, there are huge, complex IT infrastructures with many disparate and loosely integrated systems. There is little standardisation and optimisation, the cost of maintaining such a web of systems is enormous and when new functionality is needed, a tremendous effort is required to add new functionality and get multiple systems working together.
Additionally, in this new era of multi-channel commerce, companies are being forced to re-think their whole approach to the way they run their business operations. Most legacy systems are simply not built to deal with online trading let alone omnichannel commerce and the flexibility and scalability needed to support this. Finally, IT solutions today may need to encompass embrace trends in technology, ie social networking, cloud, mobile, and increased security demands and this is hard with older technologies.
FOCUSING ON MODERNISING
Whilst many companies have replaced their legacy systems managing processes such as finance, HR and manufacturing with an ERP system in the last 10 years, less attention has been given to replacing the legacy systems that manage supply chain processes. However, this has started to change, as the benefits associated with modernising legacy systems continue to surface.
As companies have come to view their supply chain as a strategic asset and are employing their supply chain today as a competitive weapon, CIOs of such organisations are looking increasingly at upgrading their legacy supply chain systems.
Most companies have traditionally relied on either: an assembly of supply chain solutions, which is a disparate set of supply chain solutions that never fully leveraged each other; or a suite of supply chain solutions, which is a set of related applications from a single vendor
but built on disparate technologies and with limited cross-functional workflow capabilities.
Migrating solutions in a suite to become solutions that share a common process platform (date, objects, workflows, common services, security etc) requires a significant investment of time and money that few vendors have been willing to make.
However a platform-based supply chain solutions portfolio that has crossfunctional awareness means changes made in one part of the supply chain are transmitted to other processes that need them. This allows information, assets and capabilities to be harnessed in ways previously not possible to help companies build profit and market advantage.
It not only means IT Directors and CIOs can now exchange their legacy supply chain system components for supply chain systems that are best in class, functionally rich, flexible, scalable and interoperable with their other systems, it also means they can invest in supply chain systems that are constantly evolving and future-proof.
Against a backdrop of continuous change, an increasingly volatile and global economy, and the arrival of the omni-channel selling world, companies need to have high levels of agility in their supply chain. A platform-based approach to running supply chain systems gives organisations the ability to fully optimise their supply chain processes as well as an approach that lowers the overall cost of technology ownership and subsequently helps maximise ROI - Logasia.
