devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Vaidya Aiyer

  • ERP Modernization: How Devs Can Help Companies Innovate 

    ERP Modernization: How Devs Can Help Companies Innovate 

    In this post-pandemic world, large enterprises are looking to streamline and improve business processes within a storm of marketplace constraints. Companies in asset-heavy industries such as oil and gas, energy, retail, or distribution and logistics have especially been working to reconfigure their supply chain processes to better manage inventory and operations. The focus in the market has shifted from supply chain optimization to supply chain resiliency, creating efficiencies that will help them best survive current delays and rising costs. 

    Breaking Barriers and Addressing the Talent Shortage

    The question is not simply whether companies need to modernize their business applications to increase efficiency and lower costs, but how to accomplish a necessary modernization in the midst of barriers like rising costs, supply chain disruptions and a severe shortage of developer talent. Developers and DevOps teams need to find ways to do more with less.

    The reimagining of business processes is an excellent strategy to reduce overhead and allow companies to become nimbler and more efficient, consequently helping them preserve or improve marketshare. Many large enterprises work in environments that use enterprise resource planning (ERP) software; systems that, over the years, have been subject to ongoing upgrades, patches and redesigns by developers and IT managers. This creates technical debt, which makes it difficult for many of these large-scale companies to migrate their business applications to cloud-based systems.

    Many of these ERP-based companies are facing pressure to update to more modern, cloud-based versions of their ERP platforms. But they must run a gauntlet to modernize their legacy applications. In a sense, companies that maintain these complex ERP-based systems find the environments are like “golden handcuffs.” They have become so complicated over time that they restrain IT departments’ innovation efforts, hindering their ability to create supply chain resiliency when it is most needed.

    To make matters more difficult, the current market is facing a global shortage of human resources required to get the job of digital transformation and application modernization done, including skilled ERP developers—especially those skilled in more antiquated languages like ABAP. Incoming developer talent is often trained in more contemporary languages like Java, Steampunk and Python. These graduates have their pick of opportunities and gravitate to companies that already work in these newer programming environments. 

    ERP migrations can be hampered by complex, customized systems developed by high-priced, silo-skilled programmers. Many enterprise leaders have a great desire to break out of these restrictions and modernize legacy applications with greater speed and at lower cost, and they need to do so with minimal downtime and disruption. 

    Leverage Low-Code Solutions to Modernize

    In a 2022 report on application development strategies, industry analyst Deepa Salem interviewed enterprise companies that used sophisticated SAP-based ERP solutions about their approach to software modernization strategies. More than 80% of respondents said they planned to upgrade their business applications in conjunction with a major migration of their ERP software platform to the latest, cloud-based version. 

    This tactic of implementing a new applications strategy in coordination with a major refresh is not surprising and presents an opportunity for developers to help these companies “clean house,” reducing the technical debt of their legacy environments at this well-timed juncture.  

    As an analogy, think about how people typically move to a new residence. Homeowners sift through their accumulated possessions and identify what’s no longer needed. They pack what is still valuable and essential. A low-code application process can help clean up existing ERP environments prior to migration, reducing complexity and long-accumulated technical debt while leveraging the system’s unique business intelligence. The tribal knowledge inherent in any legacy system is critical to retaining market differentiation. 

    With so much at stake, IT departments and developers should give serious consideration to using pre-built, customizable business applications, efficiently and rapidly created through a low-code development process. Deployment-ready solutions can help developers move forward with modernization projects that have been hampered or shelved due to a lack of talent to implement those jobs. They can accomplish more with less.

    With the right approach, ERP-based environments can be reconfigured to quickly establish more agile, streamlined and cost-effective business applications. Developers have a unique opportunity to help enterprises keep what sets them apart from the competition and surrender what no longer serves them. In this climate, this is not a nicety for enterprise customers. It’s about resilience—and even survival.

  • Are ERP-Centric Enterprises Being Left Behind?

    Are ERP-Centric Enterprises Being Left Behind?

    Many large enterprise companies are rife with departments that depend on customized ERP software applications. These systems accommodate vital business tasks ranging from inventory management to ordering capabilities to accounting programs to CRM platforms—all of which were custom-built to fit the enterprise’s specific needs and meet the KPIs of each unique organization. These applications tend to sustain grades, patches and reworks, sometimes resulting in multiple redesigns over the course of decades, and these often are not properly documented. To make matters worse, these ERP software systems also tend to be written in outdated programming languages such as ABAP for SAP and PL/SQL for Oracle, making them a challenge to update.

    For example, 91% of respondents in a recent ASUG survey of 110 SAP companies said they use custom code, and 41% of those applications were created at least six years ago. The majority of these companies said that the existence of these custom code environments has become a hindrance to digital transformation and is holding back innovation.

    These conditions create the bloated and overly complex legacy environments that are now commonplace in the enterprise market. Widespread, customized core business systems have made digital transformation particularly daunting for enterprise companies. They require significant developer resources, excessive time commitment and ample expense to strip down and redesign these custom systems for the cloud. 

    A Lack of Developers—and of Developer Interest

    U.S. Department of Labor statistics from December 2020 indicated that there will be a shortage of 40 million skilled workers worldwide, amplifying these issues further. That figure is predicted to grow to 85.2 million by 2030. What’s more, new developers entering the marketplace gravitate to more contemporary programming languages such as JavaScript and Python, as opposed to wanting to revamp archaic code used in most ERP solutions, such as ABAP.

    For this reason, large enterprise companies in a range of verticals are lagging behind when it comes to upgrading mission-critical software applications to the cloud or to a more modern architecture. These organizations are well aware they stand to gain significant productivity benefits from digitally transforming their systems so that, for example, inventory data can be accessed via a mobile device or shared from anywhere on a cloud-based platform. Yet these large organizations are stalled in their efforts to modernize. Some companies have gone as far as to scrap their current systems and start reprogramming their software applications from scratch—a hugely expensive, lengthy and laborious endeavor that’s also full of risk. 

    Leveraging Low-Code to Simplify Enterprise IT Environments

    One method that has shown progress in unraveling these overwrought environments is to apply automation through low-code integration. Ideally, an effective low-code development solution will automatically convert existing business processes to modern, cloud-native applications, allowing the organization to maintain the business logic it has built into those applications over the years, while drastically reducing the time commitment, costs and potential disruption associated with traditional, long-form integration. In SAP environments, for example, using a low-code rapid application development solution can separate the application layer from the core SAP system, automating a large portion of the migration while preserving a “clean” SAP core.

    With many organizations under pressure to keep budgets under control in what continues to be an uncertain economy, these large-scale companies are looking for ways to modernize their operations on a more controlled schedule. When enterprises use low-code solutions—and furthermore, don’t have to search for developers of these more archaic languages—they’re free to approach digital transformation in a far more incremental and cost-effective way.

    For instance, the 12 million users of SAP’s solutions are being compelled to upgrade to the modernized version of its product, S/4HANA. Yet the American SAP User Group (ASUG) research shows that only 33% of these organizations have taken on the challenge so far despite the looming end-of-life of the current prevalent version. This is because lacking a low-code development solution, companies are being pressured to convert and rebuild all their business processes in one fell swoop. Few organizations have the resources to absorb such a drastic and risk-prone undertaking. 

    A rapid application development program acts as a bridge for companies that are looking to modernize their businesses, allowing them to upgrade their applications incrementally, according to their own schedules. Low-code can be a catalyst for technical debt-ridden enterprises, allowing them to simplify complicated legacy environments and get down to the business of innovating their systems.