Centralizing Software Systems

How B2B’s Reduce the Cost of Digital

As Redstage CEO Adam Morris notes, centralizing systems is especially common for manufacturers and distributors with many different brands, and here’s why: “With centralization, you’re going to get a lower total cost of ownership organization-wide, because you’re going to have one platform — one investment. This also makes it easier to form the coveted “single-source-of-truth” for your data across your organization.

“Many business units will require the same functionality. There’s kind of an 80/20 rule where, between business units, 80% of the functionality is going to be common, maybe 20% of it is going to be unique – and it could be even less than that – but there are major cons here. Each business unit will have to wait in line for new functionality.”

Guide Decisions Based On Business Units

Morris continues, “With that said, there could be contingencies between business units that cause frustration… For instance, you have one roadmap for your transformation and you’ve got a certain set of functionality enhancements. You have to decide who gets prioritized, so the main transformation timeline might have a certain set of priorities. 

“However, if you’re sitting inside one of these business units, something that’s really important to make your business move forward, it might be very frustrating if you get slotted in nine months later, right? From a contingency standpoint, if we’re making multiple launches of features and functionality sets or even fixes, integrations and things like that, then that could cause some frustration by hanging up something that’s going on in another business unit.” 

For these reasons, some businesses choose the “Decentralized” approach to decluttering…