Decluttering Software Increases Productivity

Removing, Simplifying, and Combining Major Systems

Protolab isn’t the only manufacturer diving head-first into eCommerce, and they won’t be the last. However, with digital transformation comes a hard smack in the face of two words: “Technical Debt.” Defined as a lack of proficient technology to enable business agility, it simply means the old ways of doing things simply won’t cut it in a “New Normal” world.

Across disparate warehouses, offices, and retailers, there are a myriad of potential pitfalls. Imagine tracking a single widget from the time it is ordered, through production and delivery until the moment it lands in the hands of a customer. While that encompasses hundreds of valuable data points (for you, your sales team, and your customers), it’s tough to track everything without the right technology.

Most B2B organizations are using a wide range of software that was collected piecemeal over the years. Rather than benefit an organization’s profitability, a multitude of systems means more room for errors, and a lack of centralized business intelligence these companies can use to drive further growth.  

Simplifying Experiences for Buyers and Businesses

However, if your systems are talking to one another, it makes things much easier. You’d be surprised what systems can be integrated to streamline your processes. For example, we recently helped Tweezerman upgrade the engraving tool on their website. The tool allows customers to include custom messages on select items to make products more personal. Orders from the site are sent directly to the engraver, removing any opportunity for typos or other errors from the equation.

Moreover, in migrating three of Zwilling Beauty Group’s websites to a single Magento 2 instance (covered in our recent webinar), Redstage configured the sites to allow teams in different regions to hide or activate certain features depending on their markets’ needs and shopping habits. This allows each team to easily create different customer experiences depending on the needs of different markets. These changes and more helped ZBG achieve 87% revenue growth at the height of the pandemic.

There’s certainly a lot of advantages to decluttering systems, but there are three different ways this can be done. Learn more about these approaches in this report’s sections on: Centralizing, Decentralizing, and Hybrid frameworks.