Legacy modernization delivers efficiency and scale
Expansive, multi-year partnership with a large national wholesaler & distributor of shipping, industrial, and packaging supplies.
Is it safe to say that most of us don’t fall out of our chairs in excitement when we hear “legacy modernization”? Probably. But these can be game-changing initiatives—in fact, that’s usually the point.
It has certainly been the case with the 35+ project, 7+ year effort we’ve undertaken with a large national wholesaler and distributor to modernize their old back-end operational systems, the lifeblood of their business.
To that end, we’ve consistently delivered high-quality products over an extended period of time, across an array of business units—CRM, supply chain, order management, item management, e-commerce, etc. Our efforts have shaped engineering effectiveness, enhanced the client’s understanding of current and future states, and supported decision-making across the enterprise.
While our work is certainly not the only contributing factor, it's no coincidence that the client has experienced a significant increase in annual revenue over the course of our tenure with them.
The Full Scoop
Challenge
The client identified a growing need to modernize their operational systems, knowing their current setup lacked the reliability, efficiency, and scalability a national wholesaler needs to thrive. With monolithic systems making it difficult to distribute item, customer, and order data across multiple business locations, the inefficiencies of synchronous architecture, plus the added challenge of supporting such aging systems with new talent, they knew they were quickly approaching a point where changes had to be made.
The challenge they were facing can be boiled down to cost—business costs of outdated systems, the operational costs of the talent needed to maintain that old tech, and the risk of reputational costs of doing business inefficiently. Mitigating these costs was going to be a matter of improving workflows and capabilities supporting their supply chain, inventory management, and sales and distribution processes. Modernizing was the only option—especially if they wanted to scale with their projected growth.
The client had a solid plan in place for how to achieve this but needed a skilled partner to help them bring it to life. With an effort like this, there was as much of a need for tech expertise as for change management know-how to put the client’s plan into practice, partnering with their teams, understanding goals, and actively providing feedback and guidance where needed to ensure that work continued to progress.
Approach
Our job on every project with every client is not just a matter of delivering the right tech solutions—it’s also about equipping client teams to carry those solutions into the future themselves. This has been especially true for a program of this magnitude; it’s a sizeable undertaking, one requiring collaboration, mentorship, and great communication.
Going back to its beginnings as a data migration project (where we helped the client modernize its customer data with REST services and applications to view, edit, and maintain their data in a more agile and scalable way), our partnership over the 35+ related projects that followed has expanded to touch every system in their order-to-cash workflow.
If you know anything about microservices, much of this work has been about breaking the client’s monolithic systems into a bunch (technical term btw) of small services, each with its own responsibility, running process, database, API, UI, etc. In other words, our approach has been to break those big piles of old code up into more dynamic and flexible stuff (again, getting really technical with our terminology here)—all in order to support the efficiency and scalability the client requires.
Outcomes
The proof has a way of materializing in the pudding, as the kids say, and for this transformational program that proof lies first and foremost in the sheer volume of projects and the overall complexity of the effort. Plus, when you consider the training and support that has been needed for the client’s teams as they adapted to the new approach, it’s clear that none of this could happen without trust.
While trust is not necessarily a business outcome in itself, it certainly is both a prerequisite and result of a modernization effort like this. Our practice of embedding seasoned architects and full stack engineers alongside client teams has not only propelled the effort forward, it has also equipped their teams with the necessary skills and a culture of craftsmanship to carry this work ahead into the future. None of which could’ve been accomplished without that trust.
The result of all this—which we’re already seeing in the areas that’ve been converted to the new microservices architecture—is marked improvements in workflows, saving employees considerable time each day simply by being able to manage tasks asynchronously and having better, more reliable access to data, which, in turn, helps the client manage inventories more effectively, better serve their clients, and continue to support the growth of their enterprise.
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Is it time to modernize your back-end operational systems and applications?
Looking to scale but old tech is getting in the way?
Struggling to collect and synthesize business requirements for a legacy transformation?
