

One-size-fits-all doesn’t apply to your customers, why should it be for your software?
Building brand loyalty with software that enables continuous innovation
In today’s everywhere-all-the-time digital environment, retailers have to prove themselves with every customer transaction. For consumers, the minimum requirement is a satisfying experience. For retailers, creating brand loyalty takes much more than that. As modern digital platforms empower consumers to effortlessly compare products and services, the pressure on retailers grows. If your customers can’t get the experience they’re looking for from you, your competitor is only a swipe right away.
Unprecedented technological innovation, particularly with the advent of AI and augmented reality, enables well-tooled retailers to provide goods and services that are increasingly tailored to customer and employee needs. Not surprisingly, consumer (and employee) expectations have risen proportionately. For less well-tooled retailers, staying competitive in this environment means trying to satisfy rapidly evolving expectations with technology that wasn’t necessarily designed to do so.
Are your existing systems a help or a hindrance?
If the goal is to evolve at the pace of customer expectations, one-size-fits-all legacy systems that can’t be easily extended, enhanced, or reconfigured have a negative impact on your brand and your basket size.
Built using old programming languages and infrastructure technologies, legacy systems inherently block business agility:
- On-premise architectures make scaling or integrating with cloud-based platforms difficult
- Monolithic architectures comprise one large interconnected system, making it difficult to change or replace individual modules
- Applications are not designed to integrate or interact with modern tools and systems
- Customization requires complex and costly modifications to core code
- Stand-alone applications don’t communicate well with other systems, preventing real-time, system-wide insights
- Pre-defined workflows can’t accommodate dynamic needs
Whether they were COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) or custom-built using cutting edge (at the time) technologies–think COBOL, SQL, RDBMS, AS/400, RPG–most legacy systems are handicapped in critical ways. In fact, custom-built legacy systems often require the unique knowledge of the original developers to make any changes or updates.
Retailers that are handcuffed to one-size-fits-all systems are forced to adapt their processes to accommodate system requirements, when it should be the other way around.
Getting tooled for continuous innovation
The future of retail will be defined by those who can adapt quickly and innovate continuously. Enterprise modernization is a critical step to enabling this. While modernization may sound like a big, scary, expensive undertaking, approaching it in the right way with the right technologies can ensure the process is efficient, non-disruptive, and will pay for itself many times over.
But what are the “right technologies?” For companies that want complete control over the modernization process, cloud-native, low-code, and no-code development tools are a great solution for enabling incremental enhancement/extension of existing legacy applications, as well as swift, cost-effective, custom rebuilds. Pre-made OTS solutions that address a range of retail needs are another option.
Regardless of which you choose, enterprise solutions based on modern technologies have largely solved the legacy issues around efficiency, visibility, flexibility, and scalability:
- Standardized APIs enable seamless integration with other systems and tools and enable real-time data access
- Modular architectures enable individual modules to be added or upgraded without impacting the entire system
- Automated workflows and triggers maximize efficiency and help optimize performance
- Cloud hosting enables scalability, security, and remote access
- Low-code and no-code development tools enable workflows and interfaces to be user-designed to accommodate unique business requirements
Enterprise modernization will give you the flexibility to continuously innovate in response to changes in markets, customer expectations, and the world at large. Your biggest limitations will be your business needs and your imagination.

Hunkemöller success story
Discover the Hunkemöller case study to see how we rapidly modernized a business-critical legacy application for 850 stores.
Using Rappit Developer, the application was rapidly rebuilt and extended on Google Cloud, resulting in an ROI of 1 year!