Digital Transformation Hierarchy

How Technology Needs Change as Your Business Grows

Laura Meshen presents a fictional case study of a B2B mid-market manufacturer and how their technology needs evolve as they grow. Realizing their full growth potential led them to a full-scale overhaul and transformation of their tech stack and capabilities using Acro Commerce’s skill set at every step of the way. 

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Imagine a mid-market manufacturer; we’ll call them Famous Corp Limited, or FCL. 

FCL has a great line of products for industrial mining purposes (oil and gas, mineral, and ore) and is constantly adding new ones for land-based operations and deep-sea applications.

They can customize any one of their products for specific mining use cases. But their business model doesn’t stop there. They have installation specialists to help their clients get up and running, sell replacement parts for any equipment they make, and sell maintenance and support services.

Over the years (30+ in business), FCL has added to its tech stack and custom-built platforms to fit its needs. However, it realized there came a point when these separate systems needed to talk to each other. The data in each system is essential on its own, but an amalgamation of that data is required to provide optimal all-around products and services.

FCL needs an accelerated path to digital transformation—a way to get the most out of its data, remove manual, time-consuming processes, streamline customer experiences, and optimize workflows in every part of the company.

Digital Transformation Hierarchy of Needs 

Similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a business must fulfill specific needs as it matures.

Each level of Maslow’s pyramid can relate to a business's technology requirements as it grows and the changes it needs to make to that technology to use it efficiently and effectively. 

Therefore, I have built a visual aid to help B2B Manufacturers understand where and when technology can be updated and connected to best serve their growth. I call this the Digital Transformation Hierarchy of Needs.

Starting at the base of the needs pyramid, let’s walk through where FCL was, where they want to be and how Acro Commerce helped them get there, using Gesso and our collaborative ecosystem.

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Basic Business Needs

When FCL started its business, it recognized a need in the mining industry. Accordingly, the founders designed, built, and marketed a line of products and services to solve that need. They staffed their business with experts in research and development, design, manufacturing and the people they needed to run the company. 

This stage of business operations had mountains of paperwork, manual processes, and a lot of hands-in-the-dirt work.

How Acro Can Help Your Company at This Stage

At this stage, your technology needs are minor; you are getting your hands dirty building your business. But if you encounter a problem you think can be solved by adding a program or application to your stack, we are always here for a consult.

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Solidifying Operational Needs

Realizing their complex operations needs, Famous Corp added new and functional systems, applications, and platforms to their tech stack in the early years of their business. These systems included an ERP, CRM, PIM, CMS, and more, including a homebrew system designed for their internet-connected products that needed monitoring.

As they added systems and platforms to their ecosystem, they needed more people to transfer data between the systems. This type of manual work, entering data from one system to another, is what we call the swivel-chair process, and it is a giant resource hog. 

How Acro Can Help Your Company at This Stage

Once you start bumping up against repetitive manual tasks, this is a good indicator that implementing some level of business automation can improve your efficiency and productivity.

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Advanced Functional Needs

With a drastic change in B2B buying behaviour and the breakdown of distribution networks, FCL modernized its operations by adding a website with ecommerce capabilities to its ecosystem. With a complex product line, a service and maintenance channel, and a distribution network that still needed support, adding ecommerce meant that a cookie-cutter experience wouldn’t work for long. 

• Marketing needed a CMS to add content, customize messaging for different audiences, and to maximize the company’s online presence. 
• Sales needed digital tools that produced spec sheets and pricing tiers tailored to each account.
• Fulfillment teams needed online orders to go to the correct warehouse for picking and shipping.
• Accounting needed the ecommerce platform to pull inventory from the legacy inventory system and warn of low stock.

Long story short, adding ecommerce and a content management system was great, but it needed to talk to every other system to be effective and scale the business. 

This technology growth stage is when most mid-tier manufacturers start looking for ways to integrate systems and remove data silos with the ultimate goal of removing some of the labour and overhead from disconnected systems.

How Acro Can Help Your Company at This Stage

Integrating your critical systems is vital to unlocking growth, efficiency, and new revenue streams, and it’s what we do best.

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Scaling Needs

Once they identified the disconnect between their disparate systems as a bottleneck to scaling the business, FCL knew they had to automate and streamline how everything interacted.

They started by redesigning their technical architecture, removing complexity and platform limitations by combining their most critical operations systems: ERP, CMS, and Commerce.

By decoupling their ecommerce platform, integrating their CMS and ERP and opting for a more future-proof framework, they could 

• Remove most of the swivel chair process from the order entry area of the business.
• Ensure that their sales teams can access product and stock level information at their fingertips through the website.
• Give their marketing team a way to update the website messaging and experience without developers needing to hard-code everything. 

How Acro Can Help Your Company at This Stage

Connected data holds the keys to successful scaling. Integrations bring possibilities to life for your team.

• Provide the power of automation.
• Govern data and security.
• Enhance performance through microservices and API connections.
• Leverage current databases.

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Full Digital Transformation - The Future

The top of the digital transformation pyramid is an actualization of an iterative future: adding new multi-language and region website capabilities, integrating with other core operational platforms, and building for global expansion with multi-site and multi-brand instances.

Not only are their products top-notch, but now FCL’s tech stack allows them to streamline operations and deliver best-in-class service to their clients.

How Acro Can Help Your Company at This Stage

Using Gesso, our development accelerator, we can remove complexity and platform limitations by combining the most critical systems of your operations seamlessly. Integrate your business in new ways, improving efficiency while helping build a better customer experience online.

Evolve your online commerce experience while improving efficiency.

Contact our team using the form below to learn how Gesso makes this happen for businesses like yours.