Pivoting to the Cloud means it is now ready to scale to meet opportunities while also capturing a new revenue stream.
When a vendor-distributor of integrated supply chain solutions and industrial maintenance/repair/operations products across 15 Asian locations underwent digital transformation, it reduced total cost of ownership by 30% while achieving increased visibility, agility and innovation across the company, as well as creating an additional revenue stream with the launch of its e-commerce business.
By migrating to the Cloud, the firm, Vallen, is now able to improvement management of the complexities of owning and managing inventory. The key to the firm’s digital strategy is a nimble and highly-scalable platform and multi-tenant SaaS solution to support growth spurts, increase customer intimacy, and project growth at a CAGR of 25% over the next five years.
According to the firm’s CEO, Andrew Bennett, the firm had missed a tremendous market opportunity because its platform, systems and capabilities were not robust enough to scale quickly and support the demand for solutions and services during a growth spike a few years ago.
That has led to the firm’s eventual pivot from an in-house shared service center to a fully-SaaS model today. Apart from enabling scalable growth, the pivot has resulted in a lean IT team of only two to three to support the company across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and China. “In the SaaS model, we really rely on Infor to provide us that support in a multi-tenant environment optimized for AWS for ERP and all those connected solutions. This ensures we’re deriving full value from the Infor applications purpose-built for our business. That leaves us to focus on our core competency,” Bennett said.
The company has been working with Infor as its strategic technology partner over the years to carve out a digital roadmap that could support business growth, change management, customer value-creation and overall customer satisfaction.
The road ahead
With the move to Cloud SaaS, Vallen expects to be better poised to capitalize on market opportunities by scaling quickly and effectively as it is not as resource-intensive as before. “We’re already seeing the results. We run bespoke integrated supply customer programs for our customers, and we are now more robust and efficient in our service delivery because of the technology and platform. The first couple of programs we launched witnessed seamless customer onboarding and enhanced automation, Ultimately, we want to achieve scalable growth with Infor’s partnership and innovation. This will be a true measure of success for us.”
The new platform also create an additional revenue stream via the new e-commerce capabilities. This allows seamless management and ease of overall configuration for the onboarding of new customers and managing new business opportunities, without the need to deal with the complexities of other third-party applications. “It allows us to be ‘always on’ and to be highly-responsive to scaling business needs and customer wants,” Bennett said.
Going forward, Vallen will assess how to derive further value from its digital investments and augmenting its value proposition to customers, whether it be on the e-commerce front or digital portals for customers, or integration with third-party systems such as vending machines, made possible by the openness of their digital platform.
Said Fabio Tiviti, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Infor ASEAN & India: “We are excited to continue supporting Vallen in their digital agenda and leadership as they grow and transform their business with our solutions that are purpose-built for specific industries and finely-tuned in the Cloud.”
