Remember the New Coke fiasco? If you’re in the food and beverage industry, you probably wince when it’s mentioned. Jobs get lost over that kind of mistake. But you might not remember that it should have been a success. Focus groups backed it and most people didn’t hate it. In fact, New Coke did well in most of the country.
79 Days to Backtrack
What started as backlash from Coca-Cola’s hometown audience soon went national—then international. Many southerners were resistant—and incredibly vocal. But then everyone started to pile on. Articles in the Chicago Tribune lambasted the decision, Johnny Carson and David Letterman mocked it on late night TV.
Launched to high acclaim, things quickly went from the highest of the highs to the lowest of the lows. It took 40,000 letters and calls sent over the first month. But 79 days later, they announced a return to the original recipe.
There are many differences between then and now. Angry people on Twitter could amass 40,000 tweets within a few minutes. The launch would have been “ratioed” and this would only get fueled when celebrities began to post about it.
Today, when 24 hours in the ire of the public could be dangerous, 79 days to correct a decision could be disastrous.
Businesses Need to be Proactive, Fast, and Responsive to Change
In our whitepaper, Signs that Legacy ERP is Holding Your Business Back, we explore why today’s food and beverage businesses need modern solutions. Whether it’s adapting to increasingly fickle consumer tastes or becoming responsive to stress on the supply chain, continued use of outdated products puts you on your heels.
Here are just a few ways this is the case:
Is Your IT Team Spending Too Much Time on Day-to-Day Support?
According to Forrester and Gartner, maintenance costs range from 50 percent to more than 90 percent of a typical IT budget. Pair this with the amount of time that an IT department has to spend on patches, fixes, support calls, and other low value work, and there’s not enough time in the day to work on future-proofing the technology stack.
Are You Connected to the Global Supply Chain?
Whether it’s your customers or your suppliers, it’s likely that your food and beverage business requires you to do something globally. Unfortunately, legacy ERP wasn’t built with the global business in mind, it was built when each country had a division, and each division had their own business management products whose numbers were rolled up at the end of the year.
Are You Seeing the Entire Picture at Your Business?
If you are running on an outdated product, you know just how annoying something like end of month or end of year is. Fire up the spreadsheets and settle in, because it will take a while. You’ve got employees dedicated to the job of simply reporting, and it takes days to assemble bookings, billings and backlogs reports, or complete the periodic budgeting and forecasting process.
For the food and beverage business, this blurry picture is a problem—especially as customers expect even more transparency.
Are You Ready for a Month of Being Decentralized?
If we’ve learned anything in the past week, it’s that working from home is a necessity. However, legacy ERP was not built for this. Your sales staff needs to come back to submit expense reports or fill out paperwork, and your marketing team has to come to the office. Your finance staff needs to operate out of the office, and your IT team is probably trying to get everyone hooked up to a network.
Having the Information to Pivot: Why Legacy Software Can’t Hold Up.
It may seem somewhat ironic that we used the New Coke launch as a reason to replace a legacy product. After all, New Coke replaced a legacy product.
However, we’d venture to guess that employees probably don’t have an emotional attachment to legacy business management software. Resistance to change? Maybe. That’s pretty common. But compared to the New Coke fiasco, in which a psychiatrist told executives that some people sounded as if they were discussing the death of a family member, this is a low-emotion decision—and likely one that’s necessary for the future of your business.
There are many reasons to part with your legacy software. Reduced strain on internal resources, increased reliability, enhanced security, and unmatched flexibility, just a few of the reasons companies make a move. However, it’s more than that.
Modern business software creates new opportunities, gives your people the information they need to make decisions, and for food and beverage businesses, helps them to stay ahead of the challenges. If the past couple weeks have shown you anything, it’s that supply chains can change overnight.
If you’re looking to understand all the reasons your business can’t afford to continue pushing software past its useful life, we invite you to read Signs Legacy ERP is Holding Your Food and Beverage Business Back.
Get to Know MIBAR
At MIBAR, we’ve watched nearly every technological trend come and go, as well as a few food and beverage ones. While we can’t comment on the next big food trend, we know that the cloud represents the present and the future.
As one of the top value-added resellers in the nation, we’ve worked with companies just like yours to implement one of many cloud-based business management solutions. We get to know your business, understand your needs and challenges, and offer honest answers throughout the process. Get to know our process, our implementation methods, and our successes, and get in contact with us for a free consultation.
