Improve System Efficiency in These 4 Areas to Achieve Operational Excellence Faster

With the era of unencumbered pandemic-related IT spending officially over, IT budgets are back in the spotlight—and under increased scrutiny. Organizations facing continued economic uncertainty are taking a harder look at their spend. But rather than slash budgets, they’re looking to move the needle on key metrics, including Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), Time to Value (TTV), and overall Return on Investment (ROI), and asking the key question, ‘What should I really expect from my tech?’. 

It’s no secret. To balance growth and cost, enterprise leaders will need to adopt operational excellence strategies that drive alignment of business goals with greater resilience and agility. These operational excellence strategies can take on many forms, from streamlining processes and automating routine tasks to optimizing resource allocation or maintaining high standards of security and compliance with regulations. All of these efforts lead to more efficient operations and cost savings while enhancing business performance. 

In this blog, we explore four essential areas for enhancing IT efficiency and driving operational excellence.

A Composable Approach to Modernization

This may seem obvious, but the principal way to improve efficiency is to modernize your commerce tech stack by integrating the latest technologies into your everyday operations. However, no one has the time or the budget to overhaul their entire system without major disruptions to business.  

This is where a composable commerce approach, one that uses customizable components that are integrated incrementally, helps to enhance efficiency and lower costs by reducing development time. Under this model, businesses can quickly and easily implement or remove features based on their system performance and business needs. 

Let’s say your company would like to modernize its global payment methods. You discover Stripe, which efficiently improves payments by supporting 135 currencies and local payment options, offering robust security measures, and adhering to regulatory standards. Business stakeholders are sold on the idea, but your tech team is concerned about the time and resources it will take to implement this solution. 

Now let’s imagine you have a composable platform powered by Spryker, with access to Spryker’s App Composition Platform, where you find the Stripe App available. In this case, with your composable tech setup and low-code integration, you’re able to connect to Stripe easily and efficiently. This accelerated time-to-market means you’re delivering modernized payment processes faster and without slowing down the business.

Data Exchange Simplified

From pricing to product listings to customer information and more, a lot of vital information is passed between third-party systems that were not originally built to connect with one another—especially for companies with sophisticated and complex purchasing journeys. 

With each integration built from scratch eating up an average of a month and a half of development days, companies waste a lot of time and resources on data exchange. In fact, data integrations usually take up to 50% of overall project time. 

For this reason, data exchange is another great candidate for injecting increased efficiency into your digital commerce setup. APIs are quickly becoming the standard in data sharing. And Spryker’s dynamic Data Exchange API infrastructure facilitates secure, simple data transfer in real-time, ensuring data is efficiently exchanged across all integrated platforms. 

For more complex use cases, such as connecting your legacy ERP-system to your modern commerce platform, a Middleware solution can act as the bridge within your tech stack, handling data mapping, egress, and ingress with ease – and without as many one-to-one integrations. Spryker’s Middleware powered by Alumio, for example, ensures data is translated and formatted correctly, regardless of the source or destination—which lowers the cost of development and maintenance. 

Smooth and Efficient Upgrades 

Despite being one of the most straightforward ways to make a positive advance towards operational excellence, the best practice of maintaining constant updates is often pushed to the back burner.  

To more efficiently action platform upgrades on a regular basis, look for a vendor that offers upgrader tools and robust documentation, which help to minimize upgrade efforts. By conducting consistent code quality checks and quickly identifying inevitable updates, this kind of technology reduces future time spent on development while improving the health and security of your platform overall. 

The Spryker Code Upgrader, for example, reduces upgrade and maintenance efforts by up to 72%, allowing tech teams more time to develop at their own path and pace. 

Advanced Cybersecurity 

Cybersecurity is the most important tech need in 2024, according to McKinsey & Company. Data is the lifeblood of any enterprise, and as the risk of extreme losses from cyber incidents continues to increase, cybersecurity has become an integral boardroom priority, viewed as an investment toward protecting reputation and the bottom line. 

While some companies choose to build their own in-house security services, it is challenging and costly to keep pace with the rapid evolution of cybersecurity threats and regulatory measures. The potential impact on efficiency and cost-cutting has many turning to new alternatives, like Spryker’s Managed Security Operations Center (MSOC). Built for companies that require high levels of security, Spryker’s MSOC goes beyond standard best practices but at half the price of other leading third-party solutions. 

MSOC helps organizations ensure business continuity and safeguard critical assets in a landscape where cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated and pervasive. Integrated seamlessly with the Spryker platform, the solution ensures your business’ data is safeguarded 24/7, leveraging advanced threat detection, security management principles and practices, and around-the-clock protection. 

By fortifying your platform with intelligent automation to detect, prioritize, and respond to potential events, you reduce the time spent investigating false positives and focus only on real and urgent threats to the business. 

The Road to Operational Excellence

Operational excellence hinges on efficiency to drive continuous improvement and enhance overall productivity. And the four key areas outlined above offer a roadmap for businesses to streamline development, optimize resource utilization, and continue delivering exceptional value to customers. 

At Spryker, operational excellence is a principle that we uphold. That’s why our latest Product Release includes a range of essential features and improvements designed to drive efficiency for businesses striving to achieve peak performance. Learn how our latest release supports companies on that path.