It comes down to working on a project that’s been continuously changing over the span of three decades. Over the years my parents have customized their offerings to account for numerous clients (our focus is on wholesale distributors). Keeping track of inventory gets especially complicated when you start dealing with variants such as colors, sizes, perishables, and pre-packaged goods (our customers sell in pallets or individually).
Because of this the systems end up become getting fragmented over time to handle all these different cases and specific needs for customers. Before I joined, the developers have attempted to unify as much as they could, but the business need wasn’t quite there to justify it as much as it should.
Building out our initial SaaS offerings have helped a lot for us since there’s the concept of only having one set of code running on an instance. Because of that, we’re able to abstract away all of the different nuances of each system such that the cloud servers don’t end up in a fragmented state as well, but leaving the on-premise legacy system as it is for now. The plan is for the core ERP to eventually move in that direction, but so far we’re chipping away all the edge add-ons and functions first, such as API integrations with Shopify, Amazon, etc. and building e-commerce storefronts for our customers in React/Node.js.
Because of this the systems end up become getting fragmented over time to handle all these different cases and specific needs for customers. Before I joined, the developers have attempted to unify as much as they could, but the business need wasn’t quite there to justify it as much as it should.
Building out our initial SaaS offerings have helped a lot for us since there’s the concept of only having one set of code running on an instance. Because of that, we’re able to abstract away all of the different nuances of each system such that the cloud servers don’t end up in a fragmented state as well, but leaving the on-premise legacy system as it is for now. The plan is for the core ERP to eventually move in that direction, but so far we’re chipping away all the edge add-ons and functions first, such as API integrations with Shopify, Amazon, etc. and building e-commerce storefronts for our customers in React/Node.js.