Advance Manufacturing Cloud Adoption

As a company that started small and made its way to where it is today, our client understood that to take the next step in their growth plan they needed to look at how they could ensure that technology was there to support their vision and not hinder it. Technology needed to be seen as an enabler, as something that needed some love and attention to help pave the path forward.

They knew they had hurdles to overcome:

• ‍An outdated technology. One of the most frustrating things is knowing how to grow your customer base and not being able to act on it because the technology is old. Whilst our clients’ technology was robust and allowed them to carry on their tasks, it was not prepared to handle their next level of growth. They were ready to scale their system and were looking for developers with the right knowledge of the technology to add new functionalities and customer base.
• ‍Too many time-consuming, manual processes. During the initial phase, an organization goes through its own journey of learnings and carrying out processes in the best possible manner. As a company that has learnt everything from scratch and built a successful name for itself, they were now ready to automate their processes using software solutions that would allow them for a better allocation of resources and increased productivity. No organization towards a growth path would want to spend money or have people to get certain things done manually just to be at a risk of human errors and repetition – further adding to the loss of time and money.
• ‍Scalability, Reliability and Security: There are three key things any technology needs to have these days: Knowing that if you bring on a load of new customers that your infrastructure is going to handle it. The ability to add new features and products on the go, without having to deal with days/months of coding. Having a peace of mind and being sure that you aren’t putting your system at risk by constantly making changes. The lack of these things prevented the organization from moving ahead on the path that they had charted out for themselves.

Solution

With the company’s busiest time of the year only a few months away, there was an urgency to getting this underway. After an initial technical assessment of their infrastructure, the solutions identified for the company were:‍

• ‍Migrating their system to the azure cloud as the first step to modernize their technology: From a business growth perspective, the cloud would bring several opportunities for the organization. With the tech flexibility that they now have, their teams can optimize and accelerate workflows.
• ‍A blue-print of their system to capture the requirements: A reverse-engineering of the technical landscape that provided a blueprint of the environment was crucial for RedBit to understand their software and its construction in-depth to find the best solution to rebuild their system. ‍
• Piloting a hybrid solution to leverage the technology that was available outside and work with existing processes: Given the tight timelines, a full custom-build solution was not the right path. A hybrid solution would let them use an off-the-shelf-solution and build custom software around the foundation they had.

It’s better to be able to walk before you can run.

Modernizing legacy applications may feel overwhelming, especially with practices constantly changing. When a business is built over several years and relies heavily on its technology, it may be better to take a step at a time than radically replacing it in one go. While a fully customized solution may provide you with all what you want but it might not be the right decision, given several factors that need to be considered – be it the cost, timeline or risk involved. If you need something sooner rather than later, you can always choose from the options available to begin with and customize it differently in due course of time.

The key is to be open-minded and take the first step before the ‘pain’ is beyond control. Once you have the right foundation that lets  you leverage modern cloud technologies, you can better focus your resources on creating part of the software that's going to generate more value to your business and end users.

Benefits

Besides the visible outcomes, the biggest success for our client (and for our team at RedBit) was taking the first step to get things moving in the right direction.

Scale up or down: One of the major benefits of the cloud is flexibility. Being in their growth phase, the company can now leverage the cloud to manage their bandwidth requirements. They can either scale up or down easily based on user requirements. This means they need to pay only for what they need.

Monthly cost reduced by 40%: That’s a huge amount saved in the long run! Our client was able to invest that money it back into their business – starting with hiring skilled and experienced people like their new CTO.  

Operate with a peace of mind: “The average cost of a data breach in Canada was $6.75 million per incident in 2021*.” With the rise in cybersecurity crimes at an alarming rate today, no business can take a chance when it come to their safety. With built-in sophisticated security features within the cloud, the company can now operate without worrying about security threats and data loss.

*Source: IBM Security

What sets the company apart from others is their desire to redefine the print-on-demand market with its incredible products and services. They understand the hard work that goes into creating beautiful things and the need for places where people can find value. They intend to be that place with the right technology. This journey that they are set on, whilst not as fast as they wanted it to be, is going to ensure that their system is robust and is able to support the growing ambitions for the business.

Note: Our client is in their exciting growth phase and therefore we have not disclosed the name in this case study.

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