

When the only certainty is uncertainty, agility is your only option.
Is your legacy tech bad for business?
Like many retailers, your business is feeling the strain of the economic upheaval of the last several years. Retailing is a tough business regardless of what’s going on in the world, and lately, the world has been tougher than usual. You know people who have had to close stores, entire businesses. While outlooks are a bit bleak for the foreseeable future, it isn’t all bad. Customers are indeed more price sensitive, but they are still buying; and as long as consumers consume, there’s opportunity. It’s just a matter of figuring out where that opportunity is and being able to meet your customers there.
Going where the customers are requires flexibility and scalability. As a business, your capacity for both is only as good as your imagination and your technology will allow. Assuming your imagination is up to the challenge, maybe it’s time to start asking yourself what your technology has done for you lately.
The high cost of legacy systems
Your AS/400 or Java-based POS, inventory, and order management systems have been workhorses for the past 20 years–reliable, reasonably scalable, and robust (for transaction processing). Unfortunately, they were not designed for agility in a digital economy. For starters, they’re extremely difficult to integrate with cloud technology, analytics, or really any modern tools; they’ve got terrible green-screen-and-text-based user interfaces; it’s impossible to abstract insights from the data; and trying to update them in any meaningful way is complex and prohibitively expensive. It’s no surprise that market entrants who don’t have your technological baggage are disrupting the industry, outmaneuvering and outperforming companies like yours every day.
Upstarts like fitness retailer Gymshark, Casper mattresses, and beauty brand Glossier are case studies in how modern business models, supported by the latest technologies, are changing the rules. Selling direct-to-consumer exclusively online, these retailers gain market share and build brand affinity without physical locations. Cloud-based technologies, data analytics, social media, and community-influenced product development enable them to provide an empowering, highly personalized shopping experience that’s winning the day, gloomy outlook or not.
While there is still a very good business case for maintaining physical locations, the opportunity cost for maintaining your legacy enterprise is too high. That AS/400 is handicapping your business in a myriad ways–decreasing efficiency, hindering innovation, slowing down your supply chain, increasing employee frustration, and dissatisfying your customers. And as AI and augmented reality increasingly become a reality, the gap in your ability to compete will soon become a chasm.
Innovation isn’t just for upstarts
Regardless of how old and kludged-together your enterprise systems may be, it’s never too late to show the upstarts you mean business. Remember the four keys to longevity in modern retail we talked about last time? Take a look at your enterprise. How many of your systems are providing the efficiency, visibility, scalability, and flexibility you need to take your business to the next level?
Here are a couple of pre-digital retailers who did a similar assessment and decided it was time for change.
European lingerie retailer Hunkemöller had a particularly problematic application called the “Store Information Database.” This legacy monolith contained and managed every piece of information about every store. Developed on spec in 2011, the underlying content management platform provided zero data visibility, inhibited growth, and was about to be end-of-life’d by the provider. Read about how Hunkemöller transformed this dinosaur into a future-ready, ROI-generating machine here.
Then there’s Dutch fashion retailer Omoda who was struggling with a 15-year-old homegrown AS/400 ERP system, another monolith built on obsolete technology that was inflexible and expensive to maintain. Read about how they transformed their behemoth into a modern, future-ready, intelligent platform that enabled significant gains in efficiency, growth, and revenue.
Moving past your legacy limitations
Once you decide to start modernizing, it doesn’t have to be a monolithic effort to be successful. You can gain a lot of ground using hybrid approaches in which existing systems are incrementally updated with modern technologies such as cloud services, microservices, or containerization. Think about small things that could have a big impact. Maybe an unwieldy spreadsheet needs automating? Maybe your POS could be extended to mobile so your employees can serve customers on the shop floor? Enhancing existing applications with flexible integrations and automated workflows is a great way to get some quick wins that can have significant day-to-day impact.
On the other hand, rebuilding from the ground up using modern rapid application development tools is faster, easier, and more cost-effective than you might think. Application development tools streamline the development process with instant prototyping, automatic code generation, and built-in cloud optimization to dramatically reduce the time it takes to build, modify, and deploy custom enterprise applications at scale. No-code development tools are another option for swiftly building configurable workflow applications and add-ons without typing any code at all.
While in-house development gives you the most control over the end-to-end modernization process, hiring a development agency or purchasing COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) point solutions can provide many of the same benefits.
If your legacy systems have become bad for business, now is the time to explore modernization. By taking even small steps toward more flexible, scalable solutions, you can unlock new growth opportunities and start giving those upstarts a run for their money.

Omoda success story
Omoda, in partnership with Rappit, transformed its legacy AS/400 ERP system into a modern, future-ready core platform for all operational domains.
Discover how, by leveraging Google Cloud’s data analytics and machine learning capabilities, Omoda is now equipped with a truly intelligent system, enabling it to achieve significant growth, both in revenue (+30%) and operational efficiency.