How a leading American manufacturer increased business system's security, decreased operational cost, and increased efficiency by transforming legacy platforms with support from Birlasoft.
Suppose you are an owner of a firm that designs, manufactures, and markets access equipment. Now picture yourself in a situation where an information lag due to inefficient systems and non-integrated business architecture increases operational costs. Wouldn't you want to solve the problem? Our client, an American designer, manufacturer, and marketer of access equipment solved theirs by partnering with Birlasoft.
The Challenge
Companies may tend to inertially remain with legacy systems because of ERP systems transformation's perceived costs and operational risks. However, relying on outdated legacy software solutions limits business adaptation to rapidly evolving markets and related customer demand signals in the current global economic climate. This realization led our client to migrate from a host of legacy platforms built around Infor XA6.5 (which reached its end of life or EOL in June 2018) to the latest XA solution portfolio. Examples of crucial challenges our client faced before the transformational migration:
Vulnerable Security
Legacy systems lower the security standards as they struggle to implement continuous changes necessary to tackle the latest threats. In addition, given their age and structure, these systems are largely inflexible for implementing security patches.
High Operational Costs
As legacy systems age, they become far less economical to manage. It's challenging to find support for these systems (as older IT workers retire or move on to some other tech stack), and it's operationally expensive to deploy updates, if available.
Efficiency Issues and Information Lag
Legacy Systems are costly to manage and insecure in general. Also, they are inefficient for new workers and stakeholders unfamiliar with the system. Thus, support is required to deal with its instability. Furthermore, before migration, our client’s applications couldn't deal with information in real-time or handle high transaction volume - a non-negotiable scenario in today's era.
The Solution
The solution to the organization’s challenges required a more continuous operational modernization than the erstwhile paradigm of 1 or 2 major releases per year. This approach helped them stay in phase with emerging market conditions and readily cater to evolving customer demands.
After partnering with Birlasoft, our client’s operations supported synergistic implementations of centralized and regionalized management practices based on varied business needs and demands across the globe, this further led them to transition their systems to the latest XA solution portfolio readily. Key components of the partnership follow:
A structured approach for deploying on-premises and cloud-based solutions
The team at Birlasoft worked closely with stakeholders and process owners in global businesses to analyze applications across all functional value streams. We broke down existing process monoliths and related business capabilities and mapped them to the latest range of products from Infor. Now, with a more precise roadmap for migrating value streams from existing legacy systems to the present Infor products, future migrations will be far easier to manage.
Architecture and accelerators
For our client, we developed an exhaustive, multi-tiered global architecture, post-analysis of multiple applications, and business capabilities. The idea behind our architectural approach was to make the succeeding platform more robust and to execute a standards-based publish-and-subscribe model. This proposition was in stark contrast to the erstwhile legacy point-to-point approach. Furthermore, we leveraged application accelerators that resulted in a significant reduction of the design and deployment window. This also ensured that the future releases were compliant and compatible.
Modeling the transformation of design, development, delivery, and support
Birlasoft's approach gradually harnessed the power of the cloud and merged it with on-premise deployments using various standards-based integration platforms. Presently, Infor's cloud-based products and services offer 60% off-the-shelf capabilities, 30% work-bench supported configurable capabilities, and to cater to special business requirements, 10% customization options.
The Impact
This transformational partnership with Birlasoft for migrating to the latest tech stack has helped our client gain a technological advantage and become better aligned with the evolving needs of customers and stakeholders. Their new multi-tiered enterprise-class architectures are now ready to support cross-channel integration and access to the company's array of products and services across the globe.
While the transformation is well underway, the organization is already experiencing reduced dependency on sub-optimal customizations and has access to the software product releases as soon as they are deployed. Moreover, with optimal utilization of Infor's products, they now see continuous improvement in their application services, reducing costs from streamlined operations.
