Replatforming? Consider a suite

A coach's take on replatforming, a phenomenon that is just head-scratching.

As a freelancer, I have overseen quite a few replatforming projects. As an interpreter between business and IT, I act as an intermediary. Contrary to what I read online, I see in my replatforming projects a desire from the business. That desire is to be able to scale and/or centralize online operations faster, with the ultimate goal, of course, being to achieve greater returns.

Nowadays, as a coach, I guide e-commerce professionals who strive to achieve a good work-life balance in order to perform optimally. The company can help by:

Simple and clear processes that reduce stress.

Focusing on improving business performance.

Organizing work efficiently so they have more time for family and personal interests.

What does this have to do with replatforming?
When making choices about replatforming, there are several technical options:

Custom

Best of Breed

Suite

In principle, implementing Custom and Best of Breed e-commerce solutions can offer many and extensive possibilities. At the same time, this approach ends up creating quite a complex IT landscape that needs to be managed by someone or even an entire team. This is not for every organization. Then the question is: do you want IT management or do you want happy e-commerce specialists who are there to improve the company's performance?

While visiting Webwinkelvakdagen, I came across another ecommerce suite. From NextChapter! A fine club with people who after years of development come up with an engine for your e-commerce infrastructure, consisting of Webshops, Marketplaces, PIM, OMS and CMS. And as far as I am concerned, they are right.

If there was misery anywhere in my projects (best of breed or custom), it was on the data flows between systems. To fix and straighten it all out required many IT people, architects and consultants.

Should you need to replatform, think carefully about what your organization really needs to achieve its e-commerce ambitions. And especially what your team can handle and focus on when it comes to the ratio between working on sales results or IT management.

Therefore, in addition to the traditional Custom or Best of Breed approach, consider an e-commerce Suite. Technically, NextChapter can explain the benefits perfectly. I can only tell you, as a coach on the business side, that this SUITE is going to deliver a lot of peace of mind and speed to the business side on these components. They can get up and running quickly without waiting for API developments, issues and processing problems of the different modules of your Custom build or Best of Breed architecture. A suite allows you and your team to do what you love most, do business, market, sell and at the end of the day go home to your partner and kids nice and early.

The stress that IT can create comes at the expense of business results and also job happiness. I coach people from Generation Y, who want to perform, grow in combination with a happy and healthy personal life. And I also know that Gen Z is not really waiting for four long work days to solve data problems, but would rather use that time for what they are employed for: getting results and making a difference.

So before you make a replatforming choice, think about what you really care about, performance, job happiness or a complex architecture.

This guest blog post was written by Romeo Goedel: coaching in e-commerce business and personal transformation.

Would you like to know more about this topic or are you interested in his coaching expertise? Then feel free to contact him.

E-mail: romeo@romeogoedel.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/romeogoedel/

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