Why The Platform Matters
I run a winery! Why do I need to pay attention to the platform underpinning my winery solution?
It’s a great question. It would be easy to discount the importance of the platform supporting your winery application solution, but to do so may be at your peril. Overstated? Consider this! There are very real effort / cost savings and time to benefit outcomes for some platforms over others.
Whether your role is CFO, CIO, COO, ITM, Director of Applications, Solution Architect, SME, or another related role, we all know the pressures, particularly at this moment in history, of the ever-changing business requirements and demands for quick, fast turnaround on necessary business change. Your ability to adopt change at pace can significantly impact on business success.
If you find yourself working with a winery solution, built last decade (or earlier), chances are that you are not at a minimum, in the cloud! And with traditional development methodologies, you will be suffering from the high cost of change and the ongoing effort and cost to maintain that change (customizations and extensions).
Most organizations know where they want to get to. Still, when the technologies are not supporting flexibility and the inevitable constant change necessary for the business to adapt to the next thing, you’re constraining your business, in a world where maintaining the status quo is known to be going backward. To win, the modern business has to be able to change and adapt with frequency and at pace.
When considering your existing winery solution then, or selecting a new winery solution, how much attention do you give to the ability of that solution to rapidly adopt change? There is no shortage of winery application contenders in the marketplace, but not all are equal. Some, built on old technologies are proving to be a handbrake on business.
A Winery Specific Solution Built on No-code
The Next Generation of application tools are built on an ePaaS / No-Code platform. Enterprise Platform as a Service (ePaaS) provides everything that standard PaaS offered, while delivering enterprise grade technologies and applications developed on a No-Code development platform.
Now stick with me, as this is where the benefits come from. Nextworld™ have built a complete ePaaS offering, while also building out a complete suite of ERP applications. NuVerge has then taken that very same enterprise application platform and built out a winery specific solution on top of that platform built with no-code.
We had our very own in-house wine maker, working with our product development team and building out wine industry specific applications, functionality, reports, and integrations with the winemaker in mind. This mindset was brought to every aspect of the NuTrax for Wine design and build.
NuTrax for Wine - Functionality available today includes:
Farm Operations Appellation Hierarchy
Block Details Scale House
Grower Pricing Vessel Management
Trial Blend Quality & Inspections
Operations Search Audit Reports
Growing Degree Days Pre-built PLC Integration
Harvest
NuTrax for Wine - Roadmap functional items and extensions include:
Planning & Forecasting Survey (Gain/Loss)
Sparkling Operations Speed Updates
Specialty Wine Operations Bottling Extensions
Blockchain Packaging Extensions
Chatbots
The NextbotTM platform includes a breadth of enterprise class technologies:
No-code Development Platform Built in Reporting
Nextworld Automated Transaction Engine Automated Testing
Performance Management Tools Workflow
Advanced Security Stateless Architecture
Integrations Elastic Scalability
Analytics Data Recovery
Real World Business Benefits
Accelerate & Adopt Business Change
The no-code platform development technologies accelerate change enablement and the time to benefit. Reduced costs are available as the no-code development platform does not require specialist development skills. Subject matter experts (SMEs), business analysts (BAs) and your key trusted user community have the ability to build and extend business process requirements to meet business change needs. Development efforts are a fraction of traditional development timeframes.
Reduce Your Total Cost of Ownership
Traditionally, customizations have been painful to implement and expensive to own. The retrofit requirements for future upgrades have required high levels of effort and cost often delaying upgrades. The business was forced to put up with functionality that sometimes was not a great fit for the business process purpose. The Nextbot platform simplifies customizations and extensions through application patterns that simplify the creation of the applications and then also simplify ownership of those unique business processes over the term through, application patterns that are blueprints, able to be regenerated over any future technologies.
Enterprise Grade Security
Corporate data will in nearly all cases be safer in a Cloud SaaS application environment than in your own data center. For a Cloud ERP company to survive, it must have robust security and data protection processes and policies in place. In fact, Nominet has announced the results from research. Results show that 61 percent of security professionals believe that the risk of a security breach is the same or lower in cloud environments compared to on-premise. The costs of this enterprise grade security are once again built into the solution, further reducing business cost.
Highly Available with Built In Redundancy
Many systems are at varying levels of risk due to hosting, backups, server availability and resilience. Business interruption is significant and costly when these key systems become unavailable. Traditionally the costs to build a solution to an appropriate level of high availability and redundancy has been high. The Nextworld SaaS / ePaaS solution includes very high levels of availability and redundancy within the costs of the solution and at a fraction of traditional HA and DR costs.
The Ability to Scale to Business Demands
You don’t always know when you need more horsepower, but when you need it, you need it ASAP! While the ability to scale can be achieved in a private data center, the costs are high to have the infrastructure sitting idle, waiting for that moment of need. As winery operations step up as the harvest comes in, Nextworld automagically scales to the needs of the systems use profile. With Nextworld SaaS / EPaaS auto-scaling, this takes scalability to the next level, with the costs of this flexibility built into the solution, reducing business cost while providing the flexibility that the business needs.
In Summary – Why the Platform Matters!
Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a significant factor when considering your winery solution choice. Studies have shown that as much as 72% of today’s IT spend goes towards maintaining the software solutions of yesterday. This leaves a mere 28% of your IT budget for innovation and enablement to drive additional business growth. Winery businesses are under unprecedented levels of pressure with the wide variety of change being inflicted upon the industry.
The drought and the resulting water restrictions, Covid-19 and the need to work remotely while collaborating on business initiatives, are a couple of examples of external factors driving business change. Add to that acquisition and divestment, new product and market initiatives and the need to stay on top of internal business change requests, while being nimble, change ready and agile.
We heard and understood client challenges and complaints with traditional application suites. We have seen and experienced ourselves, the pain and cost associated with the previous generation of winery solutions. Locked in and constrained, with a high cost and effort to maintain and change to meet business demands.
NuTrax for Wine was built on the Nextworld no-code platform, to address these challenges, to enable change adoption at pace, and to meet with business process change needs. The outcome we were seeking? To reduce the total cost of ownership model for the winery over the term. All while providing an unprecedented level of enterprise grade winery functionality and technologies that extend and enhance the information available to your business users.
Ask yourself, what is the true cost of your current winery system? And does the platform beneath your winery system, support or hinder your business initiatives and change requirements today? What is the true cost to your business of not having platform flexibility? Can you change at pace to meet your business needs?