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Digital Consultancy & Business (EN) Featured-Post-Transformation-EN

Spatial Computing: How Swiss Companies Can Leverage Immersive Experiences

Spatial Computing: How Swiss Companies Can Leverage Immersive Experiences

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

Spatial computing has become a strategic operational lever for Swiss companies looking to transform their business processes. By combining augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR), these technologies create interactive environments where information becomes tangible and decisions are better informed. Beyond mere demonstration, they deliver rapid return on investment when use cases are well targeted. To succeed in integration, it is essential to adopt a progressive, open, and modular approach that leverages existing systems and capitalizes on internal expertise.

Concrete Uses of Spatial Computing in Key Sectors

Immersive technologies are revolutionizing training, maintenance, and sales in industry. They introduce a practical, interactive dimension, reducing learning times and errors during field operations.

Training and Skills Development

Integrating virtual reality sessions allows employees to acquire technical skills in a simulated environment. Learners can repeat procedures indefinitely without risk to equipment or material waste. This immersive approach boosts engagement and aids retention, especially for complex or high-risk scenarios. It proves particularly effective for mandatory and regulatory training. Discover how to train your team effectively.

Augmented Reality–Assisted Maintenance

By overlaying technical information directly onto machinery, AR guides technicians step by step during maintenance operations. Visual instructions reduce errors and speed up intervention times. Remote experts can annotate the technician’s view in real time, as if they were sharing the same workspace. This approach helps lower travel and repair costs.

Swiss Industrial Example

An SME specializing in mechanical equipment deployed an AR prototype for maintaining its production lines. In less than two months, it recorded a 30 % reduction in machine downtime for first-line interventions. This case illustrates how a targeted pilot can generate rapid ROI and convince operational teams of the value of spatial computing.

Challenges and Obstacles to Adopting Spatial Computing

Several technical and organizational barriers slow the ramp-up of spatial computing. Understanding them enables tailored responses and ensures project sustainability.

Equipment Costs and 3D Content Production

The initial cost of headsets and immersive terminals can be high, especially for large-scale deployments. Added to this is the creation of high-quality 3D content, often seen as complex and time-consuming. Without industrialized production tools, model generation can become a bottleneck. It is therefore advisable to explore open-source modules and collaborative platforms to pool design efforts.

Integration with Internal Data and Systems

For the immersive experience to be productive, it must connect to existing databases and processes. Many companies face challenges interfacing their ERP, PLM, or CRM with AR/VR solutions. A lack of standardized APIs complicates real-time synchronization of information. This challenge requires an API-first architecture and clear data governance. To learn more, consult our best practices for connecting your systems.

Progressive Approaches for a Successful Deployment

A phased strategy minimizes risks and eases stakeholder buy-in. Proofs of concept and targeted pilots are key to demonstrating value and fine-tuning technologies.

Targeted Pilots and Proof of Concept

Launch a POC on a focused use case (training, maintenance, or sales) to validate benefits before committing significant resources. This pilot enables testing various devices, adjusting graphical quality, and evaluating process impact. User feedback refines the scope and shapes a realistic deployment plan. Short POCs (4 to 6 weeks) limit initial investments. Discover our AI proof of concept.

Industrializing 3D Content

To move from prototype to full deployment, it is crucial to adopt industrialized 3D production workflows. Using libraries of reusable components and automated pipelines accelerates model generation. A tailored CI/CD pipeline allows graphic assets to be updated in line with evolving business data. This approach reduces delivery times and ensures visual consistency across immersive environments.

Swiss Real Estate Example

A property development company implemented a VR solution to showcase apartments ahead of launch. By leveraging a modular catalog of standard elements (kitchens, bathrooms, finishes), it cut virtual tour creation time by 70 %. This case demonstrates how industrialized content delivers dual benefits: speed and UX consistency.

API-First Architecture and Modular Integration

Adopt an API-first architecture to streamline interconnection between the immersive engine, ERP, CRM, and analytics solutions. Microservices dedicated to spatial computing ensure isolation and scalability of immersive use cases. Each component can be developed, tested, and deployed independently, avoiding blockers and reducing vendor lock-in. This approach also facilitates future AI module additions. For more information, read our article on API-first architecture.

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AI and Spatial Computing Convergence: The Strategic Turning Point

Integrating artificial intelligence into immersive interfaces opens new application horizons. Virtual assistants and adaptive simulations are redefining professional interaction.

Virtual Assistants and Generative 3D Interfaces

Conversational agents can guide users through immersive spaces, answer business questions, and generate 3D objects on demand. This on-the-fly visualization capability accelerates design and decision-making. Generative interfaces reduce the need to pre-create all graphic assets and ensure real-time scene personalization based on context and user preferences. Discover how AI as a Service can simplify your AI integration.

Guided Procedures and Adaptive Simulations

Embedded AI automatically adjusts the level of detail and scenario complexity to the user’s skillset. In training, the system offers progressive exercises and corrects errors in real time. In maintenance, it anticipates potential failures and suggests tailored repair protocols. These adaptive simulations boost operational efficiency and reduce performance variability.

Predictive Analytics and Data Spatialization

Using digital twins in MR allows overlaying predictive indicators on real equipment. Spatial analysis algorithms identify bottlenecks and optimize logistics flows. Decision-makers gain a 360° real-time view of performance and can model the impact of alternative scenarios. This convergence confirms that spatial computing is becoming a strategic steering tool.

Turn Your Immersive Experiences into a Competitive Advantage

Spatial computing is no longer reserved for major tech players; it has become an innovation catalyst for all Swiss organizations. By combining progressive approaches, industrialized content, and modular architectures, you can rapidly deploy high-ROI solutions. The fusion with AI amplifies these benefits, turning every interaction into an optimization opportunity.

The stakes are multiple: accelerated skills development, reduced operating costs, higher user engagement, and improved decision-making. Edana’s experts can help you identify priority use cases, design compelling prototypes, and deploy a scalable, secure platform. Together, let’s turn your immersive projects into tangible results.

Discuss your challenges with an Edana expert

PUBLISHED BY

Mariami Minadze

Mariami is an expert in digital strategy and project management. She audits the digital ecosystems of companies and organizations of all sizes and in all sectors, and orchestrates strategies and plans that generate value for our customers. Highlighting and piloting solutions tailored to your objectives for measurable results and maximum ROI is her specialty.

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Digital Consultancy & Business (EN) Featured-Post-Transformation-EN

PMO as a Service: A Flexible Model for Strengthening Project Governance

PMO as a Service: A Flexible Model for Strengthening Project Governance

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

In an environment where digital transformation is accelerating and cost pressures are intensifying, companies are seeking levers of agility and expertise to drive their IT projects. The Project Management Office as a Service (PMOaaS) model emerges as a modern alternative to internal project management offices, providing rapid access to specialized skills in governance, reporting, and methodologies.

By adopting this outsourced approach, organizations can finely tune their resources according to project cycles while maintaining strategic flexibility. This article explores the benefits, challenges, and success factors for deploying an effective and sustainable PMOaaS in your company.

Bring Agility and Specialized Expertise with PMO as a Service

PMOaaS immediately delivers experienced profiles without the need for internal recruitment. It enables a fast, targeted upskilling for your IT initiatives.

Resource Flexibility and Specialized Expertise

Engaging a Project Management Office as a Service allows you to adjust in real time the number of project managers, financial controllers, and analysts without shouldering fixed payroll costs. To succeed in outsourcing your IT resources.

This flexibility is particularly useful during intensive startup phases, such as project scoping or architecture design, where rare skills are often needed temporarily. Once these stages are completed, your organization can automatically scale down its commitment without sacrificing quality or continuity.

Moreover, external PMOs bring a cross-industry perspective gained from multiple sectors, enabling the rapid introduction of open source and modular tools for schedule tracking, risk management, and automated reporting.

Use Case: Accelerated IT Project

A mid-sized Swiss industrial company implementing a production management system enlisted PMOaaS to oversee four subprojects simultaneously. In less than two weeks, the external team set up daily reporting, aligned milestones, and standardized validation processes.

Thanks to this external drive, the organization reduced the initial commissioning time by 30% while staying within budget. This example demonstrates how PMOaaS facilitates multi-stakeholder coordination and speeds up decision-making without requiring a dedicated internal team.

This agility allowed the client to streamline communication between business units and IT, anticipate technical and operational risks, and adjust the functional scope as the project progressed.

Methodological Alignment and Best Practices

By working with diverse organizations, a PMOaaS provider refines its methodologies and offers hybrid frameworks combining Agile, Waterfall, and Lean management. This ongoing benchmarking benefits each new client, who can adopt processes already proven in similar contexts.

Integrating open source and modular tools ensures no vendor lock-in while guaranteeing interoperability with your existing systems. In line with an evolving architecture, these tools can be modified or replaced according to your roadmap without major disruptions.

Finally, process documentation, performance indicators, and project plan templates are enriched over successive assignments, providing a knowledge base that can be reused at each phase of internal transitions or temporary scale-ups.

Scalability and Cost Control via PMOaaS

The PMO as a Service model balances project team scalability with budget optimization. You pay for actual activity and can instantly adjust your management capacity.

Adaptability to Project Workload Peaks

During large-scale rollouts, such as deploying a new CRM or ERP system, your internal teams may quickly reach capacity limits. PMOaaS acts as a lever to absorb workload peaks without diverting the focus of core resources.

Depending on the phase (planning, execution, closure), you finely adjust the number of project leads, business analysts, and test coordinators, ensuring constant oversight of milestones and risks.

This on-demand adjustment avoids the extra costs of rapid hiring and maintains consistent project governance at every activity level.

Tailored Reporting and Governance

PMOaaS offers configurable dashboards that combine financial KPIs, schedule indicators, and quality metrics.

Reports can be generated automatically at a defined frequency (weekly, monthly, ad hoc) and distributed to stakeholders. This traceability enhances transparency and facilitates governance reviews, whether internal or with external partners.

Additionally, leveraging open source building blocks ensures the longevity of your indicators and the flexibility to switch platforms if needed, without data loss or prohibitive migration costs.

Example: Swiss Public Sector Agency

A cantonal public agency outsourced its project management to coordinate the rollout of a multi-service citizen portal. PMOaaS managed deadlines, feature prioritization, and standardized testing processes.

The need for strict regulatory compliance and multiple administrative approvals was handled without overloading internal staff. The project’s success demonstrated that PMOaaS can integrate effectively into constrained environments while delivering rigorous governance.

This case highlights the model’s ability to meet the security, traceability, and reporting demands of the public sector.

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Anticipating Integration Risks and Challenges

PMOaaS involves close interactions between internal and external stakeholders. Successful integration relies on proactive risk management and cultural cohesion.

Risk of Dependency

Outsourcing project governance to an external provider can create dependency if processes are not sufficiently transferred to internal teams. Without a skill-transfer plan, autonomous project management can become challenging.

To avoid this pitfall, establish a gradual responsibility transfer plan from the outset. Co-creation workshops, targeted training, and concise documentation ensure your teams build the necessary competencies.

At the end of the engagement, you’ll have not only a completed project but also an internal team ready to continue management seamlessly.

Cultural Challenges and Internal Alignment

Introducing external resources can sometimes disrupt work dynamics and communication patterns. Tensions may arise if objectives and governance structures are not clearly defined from the start.

The key is to establish a collaborative working framework, defining roles, responsibilities, and communication channels during the scoping phase. Decision-making processes should be documented and shared with all participants to avoid ambiguity.

Forming a steering committee that includes business sponsors, the CIO, and the PMOaaS team maintains an ongoing dialogue and quickly addresses any friction points.

Example: Swiss Financial SME

A mid-sized fintech company integrated PMOaaS to overhaul its payment system. In the first weeks, misunderstandings arose regarding expected deliverables and business priorities.

To address this, a realignment workshop was held with internal banking teams and external PMO consultants. The session clarified the backlog, redefined reporting flows, and established an agile governance model compliant with regulatory constraints.

This swift adjustment underscored the importance of communication and shared decision-making to overcome cultural barriers and ensure cohesive project management.

Success Factors and Outlook for the Hybrid, Digital PMO

Effective PMOaaS rests on clear governance, precise SLAs, and controlled hybridization. Integrating digital tools and AI paves the way for the next-generation PMO.

Clear Governance and Precise SLA Definition

From the start of the engagement, define performance indicators and service levels to set expectations. SLAs specify experts’ availability, deliverable turnaround times, and incident escalation procedures.

Transparent governance fosters stakeholder buy-in and simplifies performance reviews. Each financial or operational metric should be measurable and time-bound.

These SLAs act as a mutual trust contract, ensuring rigorous management and service continuity, even during rapid team changes or priority shifts.

Internal-External Hybrid Model

A hybrid PMO combines internal resources for domain knowledge with external experts for methodological expertise. This partnership requires clearly defined roles and seamless collaborative processes.

Creating shared workspaces, whether physical or virtual, and using common tools (backlog management, risk tracking, dashboards) ensures transparency and collective ownership of deliverables.

The goal is to build a cohesive project team where external expertise catalyzes internal skill enhancement, leading to a full competency transfer over time.

AI for a Digitalized PMO

Artificial intelligence technologies can automate project data collection, variance analysis, and risk prediction. Virtual assistants provide real-time alerts on schedule or budget anomalies, reducing manual effort.

Recommendation engines, trained on your project history, suggest action plans and reporting templates tailored to your context. This data-driven approach boosts the responsiveness and quality of governance.

Ultimately, integrating AI into a hybrid PMO will enable an Intelligent Control Center capable of anticipating bottlenecks and proposing remediation scenarios in just a few clicks.

Implement a Project Management Office as a Service for Optimal Governance

PMOaaS offers an agile response to growing needs for governance, reporting, and methodology without increasing fixed costs. By combining external expertise, successful hybridization, and digital technologies, you gain responsiveness and reliability in your IT projects.

To maximize benefits, define clear SLAs, ensure progressive skill transfer, and foster cross-functional communication. The hybrid approach, enhanced by AI, heralds intelligent, predictive project management.

Whatever your industry or maturity level, our project management experts are ready to guide you in implementing a PMO as a Service tailored to your challenges and corporate culture.

Discuss your challenges with an Edana expert

PUBLISHED BY

Mariami Minadze

Mariami is an expert in digital strategy and project management. She audits the digital ecosystems of companies and organizations of all sizes and in all sectors, and orchestrates strategies and plans that generate value for our customers. Highlighting and piloting solutions tailored to your objectives for measurable results and maximum ROI is her specialty.

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Digital Consultancy & Business (EN) Featured-Post-Transformation-EN

ERP & MedTech: a Management System to Secure, Trace, and Industrialize Innovation

ERP & MedTech: a Management System to Secure, Trace, and Industrialize Innovation

Auteur n°3 – Benjamin

In the MedTech sector, regulatory pressure and market expectations are driving organizations to reinforce compliance while accelerating their time-to-market. A modern Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system thus becomes the central nervous system connecting production, quality, procurement, supply chain, finance, and regulatory affairs. By relying on an open architecture and real-time data flows, it ensures batch traceability, serial-number tracking, and the ability to conduct internal or external audits. The goal is to industrialize innovation without sacrificing the flexibility needed to quickly adapt bills of materials, product variants, and sterilization or packaging processes.

Regulatory Compliance: A Core MedTech Challenge

Mastering ISO 13485, ISO 14971, the Medical Device Regulation (MDR), the In Vitro Diagnostic Regulation (IVDR), and FDA requirements is a prerequisite for any serious MedTech organization. A dedicated ERP automates documentation, validation, and process traceability to satisfy audits and anticipate risks.

ISO 13485 and Quality Management

An ERP configured for this standard centralizes quality procedures, training records, and non-conformity reports.

By standardizing approval workflows and automating document generation, it reduces the risk of human error. Teams can focus on corrective actions and continuous improvement. The platform also manages process reviews and quality performance indicators.

This structured approach eases both external and internal audits by providing instant access to records. Experience shows that an ERP optimized for ISO 13485 can cut audit preparation time from several days to just a few hours.

MDR, IVDR, and FDA Requirements

The Medical Device Regulation (MDR) and the In Vitro Diagnostic Regulation (IVDR) impose enhanced traceability from design through distribution. Companies must demonstrate device compliance and incident tracking.

An ERP with regulatory modules stores design history files, validation plans, and clinical performance reports. Data flows are continuously audited, providing full visibility over every batch, component, and test result.

For organisations targeting the US market, the ERP also incorporates FDA requirements for reporting, Corrective and Preventive Actions (CAPA), and change management. It can automatically generate Form 483s or vigilance reports to satisfy authorities.

Internal Audits and Risk Management

Regular internal audits are essential to identify gaps and implement action plans. An ERP with a risk management module (ISO 14971) maps hazards, occurrence probabilities, and mitigation measures.

It alerts stakeholders when a criticality threshold is exceeded and formalizes periodic reviews. This proactive approach reduces non-conformities during inspections and strengthens the quality culture within teams.

Open Architecture and Seamless System Integration

To avoid data silos and vendor lock-in, a MedTech ERP must leverage an API-first architecture and microservices. It should connect frictionlessly to quality management systems (QMS), laboratory information management systems (LIMS), product lifecycle management (PLM), manufacturing execution systems (MES), CRMs, IoT platforms, and test equipment.

API-First and Microservices

An API-first architecture ensures that every business function is exposed via standardized interfaces. Microservices break functional domains (quality, production, procurement, finance) into independent, scalable modules.

This modularity limits the impact of updates and simplifies the adoption of new solutions. IT teams can deploy or replace a service without major disruption to the overall environment.

Each microservice can be developed in open source or proprietary technology as needed, while remaining interoperable through protocols like REST, GraphQL, or gRPC. The direct benefits include enhanced scalability and resilience.

Connectors for QMS, LIMS, PLM, and MES

Quality management systems, laboratory systems, product lifecycle management, and production execution systems contain critical MedTech process information.

A MedTech ERP with preconfigured connectors synchronizes specification data, laboratory systems test results, validations, and production details in real time. Documents and outcomes are centralized, ensuring data consistency and end-to-end traceability.

This integration eliminates re-entry, version errors, and delays, while providing a unified view for regulatory, R&D, and production teams.

IoT and Test Equipment Integration

Internet of Things (IoT) devices and test machines generate large volumes of performance and compliance data. An open ERP captures these streams and associates them with batches, serial numbers, and processes.

Automated alerts flag parameter deviations—such as excessive sterilization temperature or mechanical test force variation. Corrective actions are logged in real time.

Example: A medical diagnostics provider integrated its automated test bench with an open-source ERP. Each measurement was automatically linked to the relevant batch and locked after analysis. The company saw a 30% reduction in production rejects, demonstrating the effectiveness of data-driven integration.

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Real-Time Data to Secure Production and Anticipate Issues

Collecting and analyzing real-time data enables anomaly detection, secures production, and enhances supply chain reliability. These insights boost predictability and reduce non-compliance risks.

Batch and Serial-Number Traceability

Every component and finished product is identified by a batch or serial number. The ERP captures these details from raw material receipt through market release.

A barcode scan on the shop floor triggers real-time recording of manufacturing steps, quality checks, and packaging operations. Any deviation is automatically flagged and documented.

The link between batches, suppliers, and test results ensures precise traceability. In case of a recall, the company can target affected batches and limit production impact.

Real-Time Monitoring and Alerts

ERP dashboards provide a consolidated view of production order progress, inventory levels, quality incidents, and performance metrics.

Configurable alerts (overdue tasks, process anomalies, temperature deviations) are sent to the relevant stakeholders, who can immediately initiate investigations or corrective actions.

This continuous support strengthens process control and speeds decision-making, especially in time-sensitive environments.

Predictive Quality Analytics

Machine learning algorithms can be integrated into the ERP to anticipate failures and optimize maintenance schedules. They leverage production history, equipment usage data, and test reports.

This predictive approach identifies risk patterns before they result in non-compliance. Interventions are scheduled proactively, reducing unplanned downtime.

Example: An orthopedic prosthesis manufacturer deployed a predictive analytics module within its ERP. The tool cut production incidents by 25% by forecasting seal failures on specific components, illustrating the value of intelligent, anticipatory maintenance.

Industrial Flexibility and Agility at the Heart of Innovation

A MedTech ERP must offer high flexibility to quickly adjust bills of materials, product variants, sterilization protocols, and packaging processes. Industrial agility becomes a competitive advantage.

Dynamic Bill of Materials and Variant Management

The diversity of medical devices requires detailed management of bills of materials and variants. The ERP defines multi-level structures for each product family.

When a new component is approved or a variant introduced, all production, quality, and regulatory records are automatically updated. Costs and timelines are recalculated in a few clicks.

This automation speeds up the production launch of new items and minimizes errors from manual updates.

Adaptable Sterilization and Packaging Processes

Sterilization protocols vary by material and regulatory requirements. A flexible ERP enables multiple scenario configurations, critical parameter recording, and associated report generation.

For packaging, the solution manages formats, packaging types, and labeling by market. Work instructions are delivered to operators and electronically validated.

This detailed traceability assures compliance and reduces errors during packaging and shipping.

Rapid Iterations and Integrated Approvals

R&D and regulatory teams often must collaborate to quickly validate new product iterations. The ERP includes multi-stakeholder approval workflows for each new version.

Pilot runs can be launched directly from the system, capturing results and comments. Upon approval, the new version is deployed to production without a full overhaul.

Example: An in vitro diagnostics company leveraged this capability to release thirteen test variants in six months, with no significant cost increase and full audit compliance. This agility accelerated its commercial rollout across several European countries.

MedTech ERP: Catalyst for Compliance and Industrial Agility

A dedicated MedTech ERP is more than a planning tool. It becomes the guarantor of regulatory compliance, traceability, and industrial flexibility essential for innovation in a demanding sector. By combining an open architecture, real-time data flows, and configurable processes, it secures every step of the value chain.

The benefits are tangible: faster time-to-market, lower quality costs, audit readiness, and minimized non-compliance risks. To stay competitive, adopting a modular, scalable, and interoperable MedTech ERP is now indispensable.

Our experts are ready to assess your needs, define the optimal architecture, and guide you through your ERP implementation. Together, let’s turn regulatory and industrial challenges into performance drivers.

Discuss your challenges with an Edana expert

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Digital Consultancy & Business (EN) Featured-Post-Transformation-EN

Digital Maturity Assessment: The Tool That Reveals Where Your Company Is Losing Value

Digital Maturity Assessment: The Tool That Reveals Where Your Company Is Losing Value

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

In an environment where the pressure to digitalize is intensifying, executives are often uncertain about the real benefits to expect. Many initiatives fail due to a lack of precise identification of bottlenecks or a shared vision at the leadership level. The digital maturity assessment serves as both an operational and financial tool, capable of uncovering hidden inefficiencies, aligning priorities, and quantifying the expected return on investment.

Far more than a simple audit, it exposes the gap between strategic ambition and actual operations, structuring a pragmatic, sequenced digital transformation plan that can be activated immediately.

Measuring the Gap Between Ambition and Actual Operations

The assessment is not about assigning a score but about revealing the disparities between your strategic ambitions and operational reality. It’s the key to targeting digital investments where they will have an immediate impact.

Clarifying Strategic and Business Ambitions

The starting point is translating growth, quality, or market share objectives into concrete metrics. By mapping these ambitions, you determine the expected performance level for each key process and distribution channel.

This phase engages leadership to align their visions: finance, marketing, operations, IT, and customer relations must share the same priorities. Without this alignment, digital initiatives risk diverging and consuming resources without generating tangible value during the scoping phase.

The assessment relies on structured interviews and collaborative workshops to extract and formalize these objectives. Perception gaps between stakeholders are visualized as impact-and-probability matrices.

By clearly defining an agreed-upon ambit, the process establishes accountability that streamlines decision-making and validation of the next steps in the transformation plan.

Mapping Existing Processes and Systems

At the core of the assessment, all workflows and tools in place are identified, paying close attention to every friction point. This mapping reveals duplicates, manual interventions, and unnecessary steps that slow execution.

It also catalogs patched solutions, ad-hoc integrations, and makeshift interfaces that often hide security vulnerabilities or high maintenance costs. Each component is analyzed to understand its actual contribution to overall performance.

In one concrete case, a Swiss watchmaking SME had developed five non-interoperable production management systems. The assessment revealed that teams were losing two hours daily consolidating reports manually. This analysis demonstrated the urgency of a targeted optimization plan.

The evaluation also considers process flexibility in light of future changes. By comparing the current map with projected needs, you anticipate necessary developments and avoid unsuitable technology choices that generate technical debt.

Assessing Operational and Financial Impact

Once gaps are identified, the next step is to quantify their cost in time, human resources, and lost revenue. Each inefficiency is translated into euros or Swiss francs to prioritize initiatives based on their potential profitability.

This phase draws on data analysis as well as interviews with on-the-ground managers to measure workaround efforts or induced risks. The gain forecasts become precise enough to guide investment decisions and establish a robust IT budget.

For example, a financial services firm discovered that the lack of integration between its CRM and billing tool caused 15% of invoices to be delayed, resulting in unpredictable cash flow. The assessment showed that implementing a simple API interface would halve this impact.

By quantifying potential gains, you also establish ROI indicators and possible financing scenarios. This enables the creation of robust business cases essential for securing buy-in from the executive committee and business unit leaders.

Economic Levers Revealed by the Digital Assessment

The assessment highlights five often-overlooked value-creation levers, presented in clear economic terms. Each lever contributes to the overall ROI beyond isolated technical functionalities.

Value Proposition and Operating Model

The assessment evaluates how digital tools can strengthen the customer promise and streamline distribution channels. It identifies additional or untapped revenue sources and pinpoints friction points between offering and market.

This analysis provides a clear view of potential margins: optimizing dynamic pricing, personalizing offers, or introducing complementary services. Each opportunity is quantified to align the digital strategy with financial objectives.

For example, a B2B services SME discovered that its website lacked a cost simulation feature for its services. The assessment demonstrated that such a module could increase conversion rates by 20% and generate a higher volume of qualified leads.

By refining the operating model, you redefine sales processes, commission structures, and potential partnerships to fully leverage digital effects. Projections include acquisition costs and margins to offer a realistic view of gains.

Customer Journey and User Experience

Beyond simply deploying a CRM, the assessment examines how each touchpoint retains or repels customers. It measures journey breaks and their cost in terms of abandonment or complaints.

The goal is to turn the experience into a competitive advantage by simplifying journeys, automating follow-ups, and centralizing information. Gains translate into reduced churn and increased average order value.

The assessment also recommends integrating real-time satisfaction and feedback indicators to refine journeys. This optimization allows immediate detection and correction of pain points before they damage the brand image.

Processes and Operations

Every repetitive task or operational friction point is measured to estimate time and cost savings. The assessment identifies steps that can be automated or redesigned to eliminate manual interventions.

It relies on performance data and field feedback to map productivity losses. Transformation scenarios include the full cost of intervention, from training time to software licenses.

Calculated gains are then converted into operational KPIs: reduced processing cycle times, compliance rates, or fewer quality issues. These indicators form the basis for measuring the effectiveness of implemented improvements.

Culture, Leadership, and Execution Capability

The assessment goes beyond tools, analyzing the organization’s attitude toward change. It identifies cultural barriers and skill gaps that hinder digital project execution.

This dimension enables forecasting of training, coaching, or team-strengthening actions. Without appropriate governance, technology investments remain under-utilized or even abandoned.

Beyond training, the assessment recommends establishing steering rituals and monitoring committees to maintain long-term engagement. This governance strengthens organizational resilience against unforeseen challenges.

Information Systems and Technology

This analysis assesses the IT architecture, integration quality, and security level. The study uncovers silos, missing APIs, and temporary patches that limit performance and scalability.

The assessment compares the current structure with best practices in cloud, automation, and modularity to define priority optimizations. Each recommendation is costed and placed on a progressive evolution path.

Technology scenarios outline a pragmatic migration plan, combining existing components with bespoke developments. They address security, compliance, and maintenance concerns to ensure solution longevity.

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Why an Assessment Reveals the Invisible

The assessment brings to light imperceptible internal dysfunctions and hidden costs that weigh on your performance. It uncovers value levers that even experienced executives cannot perceive alone.

Operational Duplications Across Departments

Over time, each department installs its own tools and processes to manage its activities. The assessment detects overlaps between these siloed solutions, which increase maintenance burdens.

These duplications lead to disparate data, multiple license costs, and hours spent consolidating information. The assessment quantifies the impact of these redundancies and proposes a coherent consolidation of practices.

The next phase defines governance rules for shared tools and establishes monitoring indicators to prevent duplicate efforts from recurring. This approach ensures sustained organizational efficiency.

Automatable Tasks with Just a Few Lines of Code

Many low-value tasks still consume human resources when a script or automation routine would suffice. The assessment identifies these productivity pockets.

By evaluating task volume and frequency, you establish a clear cost-benefit ratio for each automation. Potential gains are then integrated into the digital roadmap, enabling rapid quick wins.

Beyond technical implementation, the assessment provides a governance framework to maintain and evolve these automations. It includes risk assessments and automated testing definitions to ensure script reliability.

Data Inconsistencies and Their Impact on Analysis

Data silos and heterogeneous formats undermine the reliability of dashboards and strategic analyses. The assessment highlights these fractures and their cost in misguided decision-making.

Each duplication or lack of synchronization is quantified in terms of missed opportunities or risks, such as inappropriate pricing or failed incident prevention.

The assessment then recommends implementing a data lake or structured data warehouse, accompanied by a metadata repository and validation workflows. This architecture ensures data consistency and traceability.

An Unprecedented Strategic Alignment

The assessment breaks down silos and provides a cross-functional view that aligns all stakeholders around common objectives. It transforms a list of disparate projects into a coherent, prioritized trajectory.

Breaking Silos and Uniting Teams

In most SMEs and mid-sized companies, each department develops its own vision and tools without coordinating with others. The assessment identifies these autonomous islands and demonstrates their negative effects on overall performance.

By confronting the needs and processes of each department, a common language is created and shared governance established. This dynamic fosters buy-in for cross-cutting projects and reduces friction.

Beyond technical aspects, the study highlights tension zones and proposes collaborative workshops to set common priorities and strengthen internal cohesion.

The success of this approach relies on involvement from top-level sponsors who validate the scope and allocate necessary resources. The assessment can thus trigger a results-oriented team culture.

Sharing a Cross-Functional, Operational Vision

The assessment builds a unified map of processes, systems, and resources, giving leadership a comprehensive, detailed overview. This global view facilitates informed decision-making.

Each recommended action is tied to a clear business objective, whether cost reduction, quality improvement, or time-to-market acceleration. This alignment ensures that every digital project serves the company’s strategy.

The tool also traces dependencies between initiatives to avoid bottlenecks and anticipate skill and budget needs.

This shared vision enables transparent communication on progress and expected outcomes to all stakeholders, thereby boosting trust and execution speed.

Prioritizing Initiatives Based on ROI

Once gaps and levers are identified, the assessment quantifies the expected ROI for each action. Projects are then ranked by profitability and urgency.

This method prevents launching multiple initiatives simultaneously without sufficient resources, which dilutes impact and increases failure risks. It directs investments toward quick wins and foundational projects.

The assessment also offers a scoring model based on business impact and operational risk, ensuring objective decision-making aligned with the overall strategy.

Sequencing Actions to Mitigate Risks

The assessment defines an action plan broken into successive phases, based on dependencies and operational constraints. Each phase delivers concrete, measurable value.

This incremental approach eases team adoption, reduces technical debt, and allows roadmap adjustments based on results.

By creating a modular timeline, you also anticipate organizational impacts and plan training, support, and skill-up initiatives for each step.

Milestones for each batch include success criteria and performance indicators to ensure transparency and responsiveness to project uncertainties.

Uncover the Hidden Value of Your Digitalization

The digital maturity assessment offers a precise map of the gaps between your strategic ambition and actual operations. It reveals value levers, guides investments toward quick gains, and outlines a clear trajectory to maximize the ROI of your transformation.

By breaking down silos, aligning teams, and quantifying every initiative, it reduces failure risk and accelerates implementation. This pragmatic, ROI-oriented approach is the indispensable prerequisite for any successful digitalization.

Our experts are ready to support you in this journey toward clarity and performance. Together, let’s establish a contextual, secure, and scalable digital strategy aligned with your business priorities and financial objectives.

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Mariami Minadze

Mariami is an expert in digital strategy and project management. She audits the digital ecosystems of companies and organizations of all sizes and in all sectors, and orchestrates strategies and plans that generate value for our customers. Highlighting and piloting solutions tailored to your objectives for measurable results and maximum ROI is her specialty.

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Change Management: The True Driver of ROI in Complex Digital Transformations

Change Management: The True Driver of ROI in Complex Digital Transformations

Auteur n°3 – Benjamin

In an environment where technological innovations follow one another at a breakneck pace, the main challenge is no longer selecting the right solution but an organization’s ability to extract the expected value. Change management thus becomes far more than a simple “resistance management” component: it is structured as a continuous adaptation mechanism.

By aligning teams, securing execution, and turning every employee into an agent of change, change management proves to be a lever for lasting performance and a multiplier of ROI. This article explores the four pillars of effective change management to maximize the impact of complex digital transformations.

Strategic Alignment and Committed Leadership

The success of a digital transformation hinges on clear, mobilized leadership. Decision-maker engagement creates the essential framework of trust for team buy-in.

The Role of Leadership

Driving change requires visible involvement from senior management. When the steering committee regularly communicates its vision, it enhances the project’s credibility and gives meaning to the actions deployed. Without this institutional backing, initiatives often remain perceived as IT projects disconnected from business priorities.

Committed leadership accelerates decision-making and proactively clears obstacles. By establishing short, regular steering-committee meetings, trade-offs occur in real time, avoiding critical delays and bottlenecks. This dynamic preserves the momentum needed to roll out new functionalities without interruption.

Finally, the presence of executive sponsors fuels cross-functional mobilization. Business and IT leaders then feel supported and legitimized to adjust their priorities. This shared legitimacy creates an environment conducive to innovation and facilitates interdepartmental cooperation.

Collaborative Governance

Engaging stakeholders early in the project prevents misunderstandings and priority conflicts. A governance structure that brings together IT leadership, business units, and external partners promotes continuous exchange and co-creation of solutions. Each actor better understands how their choices affect the entire ecosystem.

Setting up cross-functional workshops allows business requirements to converge with technical constraints. These collaborative sessions speed up the identification of acceptable compromises and reduce late-stage iterations. Above all, they establish a culture of shared accountability, the foundation of rapid adoption.

An agile governance model adapts its structure to the project context. In a highly regulated environment, it may be appropriate to involve compliance or security representatives from the design phase. This flexibility ensures that the change is built to last and complies with both internal and external requirements.

Targeted Communication

A stakeholder-oriented communication strategy maximizes the impact of key messages. Each channel—internal newsletter, town hall, intranet—must be chosen based on audience and project phase. This segmentation prevents information overload and ensures understanding.

Messages should be concrete and illustrated with use cases. Presenting the anticipated operational gains rather than general concepts simplifies adoption. Employees appreciate knowing how their daily work will evolve and what benefits they will derive from the new organization.

Finally, tracking sentiment indicators via short, regular surveys enables you to detect frustration hotspots before they solidify. This fine-tuned perception management acts as a barometer to adjust the frequency and content of communication campaigns.

Example: A training institution involved its educational managers and instructors from the outset when defining the scope of a new ERP system. This co-creation reduced requirement-gathering sessions by 30% and demonstrated that inclusive leadership accelerates the acceptance and adoption of standardized processes.

Continuous Adaptation for Sustainable Adoption

Change management is not limited to a one-off transition phase. It incorporates a system of continuous improvement to maintain alignment between technology and usage.

Feedback Loops and Rapid Adjustments

Implementing systematic debriefs after each major milestone quickly identifies friction points. These feedback loops—formal via steering committees or informal via discussion groups—provide indispensable field insights.

Ground-level feedback feeds the roadmap and guides project-team priorities. Instead of accumulating adjustments at the end of the cycle, you enable short, targeted iterations. This agile approach mitigates the tunnel-effect and ensures the solution remains aligned with real needs.

After each sprint, documentation and training materials are updated to reflect changes. Users thus have always-relevant tools. The organization gradually adopts a culture of continuous improvement, turning every user into an active contributor.

Structured Training and Skills Development

Training must be contextualized with real business scenarios. Group sessions alternating with hands-on workshops foster the appropriation of new tools. Learners thus understand how to use features in their daily environment.

A modular training plan combining e-learning, coaching, and workshops addresses varying maturity levels. Super-users are trained first to act as relays and ambassadors within their teams. They play a key role in disseminating best practices and handling proximate questions.

Tracking skill-development indicators through quizzes and internal certifications allows you to adjust pace and format. Training managers gain quantitative visibility on adoption and can intervene quickly if needed.

Measuring Adoption Metrics

Defining clear KPIs before launch enables objective adoption management. You can monitor actual module usage, training completion rates, and the number of support tickets related to new features.

Analyzing usage trends highlights under-adopted areas and those enjoying critical success. Continuous monitoring informs steering committees and guides support and re-engagement priorities.

When shared regularly with governance, these metrics become motivational levers for teams. They see progress and adjust their commitment with full awareness.

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Industrialized Rituals to Orchestrate Multiple Initiatives

The ability to carry out multiple transformations simultaneously relies on standardized processes and rituals. They ensure coherence and control at enterprise scale.

Project Portfolio Governance

To avoid scattered efforts, it is essential to have a dedicated governance committee for the project portfolio. It prioritizes and coordinates initiatives according to strategic stakes and interdependencies.

This committee relies on a shared dashboard, continuously updated, summarizing progress, risks, and allocated resources. Trade-offs can thus be made quickly without undermining the overall vision.

Weekly and monthly reviews structure these rituals and maintain transparency. Each transformation has a forum to present its advances and challenges, limiting silo effects.

Ritual Standardization

Defining a common format for kickoff workshops, interim demos, and post-go-live reviews streamlines preparation effort. Teams know exactly which deliverable to produce and how to present it.

This standardization reduces administrative burden and fosters project comparability. Good practices identified in one initiative are quickly transferred to others, creating a virtuous cycle.

Standardized rituals also serve as an excellent means to capitalize on lessons learned. Meeting materials, key indicators, and templates are reused from project to project, ensuring progressive maturity gains.

Cross-Functional Coordination

Beyond official rituals, setting up informal communication channels—forums or communities of practice—enriches coordination. Participants share tips and tricks, speeding up the resolution of recurring issues.

Transverse coordination also relies on business referents with a formal “handoff” role. They facilitate knowledge transfer between teams and organize consolidation workshops.

This multi-project approach enables parallel steering of ERP, AI, automation, and new operating models in a concerted manner without multiplying governance structures.

Example: An industrial group established a single monthly committee to oversee the deployment of a CRM, the automation of billing processes, and the integration of an internal AI solution. This unified governance demonstrated that ritual standardization reduces redundancies and accelerates cross-functional decision-making.

Change Management as a Multiplier of Operational Value

Organizations that master change do more than cut costs: they magnify the impact of every digital investment. Change management becomes a measurable performance lever.

Reducing Internal Frictions

A structured change-management system anticipates and mitigates friction points. By identifying potential resistance during the design phase, you reduce the number of in-flight corrections and post-deployment support costs.

Working agreements and incident-management processes are aligned with new workflows, preventing rework and service interruptions. Teams thus gain fluidity and responsiveness.

This reduction in friction directly impacts employee satisfaction. A calmer work environment fosters creativity and initiative—essential elements for complex project success.

Optimizing Business Processes

Effective change support enables deep reengineering of business processes. Usage analysis and bottleneck identification often lead to simplifications that free up resources.

Workflows are redesigned to leverage new systems’ capabilities and automation principles. Processing times shrink, errors decrease, and operational quality improves markedly.

This optimization also positively affects organizational scalability. The company can absorb increased activity without a proportionate rise in costs.

Impact on ROI and Performance

By combining committed leadership, industrialized rituals, and a continuous-improvement approach, change management yields accelerated time-to-value. Expected financial benefits are captured earlier, boosting the project’s overall profitability.

Rigorous measurement of indicators—productivity gains, adoption rates, reduction in support tickets—demonstrates quantifiable ROI. These data feed the decision-making process for future digital investments.

Ultimately, change management is not an additional cost but a value multiplier that sustains performance and solidifies an organization’s competitive edge.

Example: A financial services firm found that after industrializing its change management, it achieved a 40% acceleration in rolling out new ERP functionalities and a 25% drop in adoption-related support tickets. This case shows that a mature system maximizes return on investment.

Change Management: Engine of Sustainable Performance

Structured change management transforms a technical project into a true performance engine. By aligning leadership, integrating continuous adaptation, industrializing rituals, and optimizing processes, every digital transformation becomes a source of measurable value. Organizations capable of undertaking multiple initiatives simultaneously gain agility, reduce friction, and capture gains more quickly.

In a world where technology evolves faster than organizations, this adaptability makes the difference. Our experts support companies in implementing contextual, modular, and secure change-management systems that ensure sustainable ROI and a lasting change culture.

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Hadoop: An Ultra-Scalable Data Lake Foundation but Heavy and Limited in Real-Time

Advantages and Disadvantages of Hadoop: An Ultra-Scalable Data Lake Foundation but Heavy and Limited in Real-Time

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

In an environment where data volumes are exploding and combine structured and unstructured formats, choosing a robust and scalable Big Data architecture is essential. Hadoop, with its ecosystem centered on HDFS for distributed storage and YARN for resource orchestration, retains a prime position when building a data lake foundation capable of storing petabytes of data at minimal software cost.

Nevertheless, its operational complexity and native batch engines quickly reveal their limitations when aiming for near real-time processing or rapid iteration cycles. This article details Hadoop’s advantages, constraints, and alternatives to inform your strategic decisions.

Why Hadoop Remains Relevant for Very Large Volumes

Hadoop offers exceptional horizontal scalability thanks to its shared-nothing architecture. HDFS and YARN ensure fault tolerance and a clear separation between storage and compute.

Distributed Architecture and Fault Tolerance

Hadoop relies on HDFS, a distributed file system that fragments and replicates data across multiple DataNodes. This redundancy allows for node failures without data loss.

The NameNode orchestrates the cluster topology, while YARN distributes compute tasks, ensuring efficient allocation of CPU and memory resources. For more information, check out our guide to Infrastructure as Code.

In case of a node failure, HDFS automatically replicates missing blocks onto healthy machines, ensuring high data availability without manual intervention.

Open-Source Software Cost and Commodity Hardware

The fact that Hadoop is an Apache open-source project drastically reduces licensing costs. You only pay for hardware and integration, without usage fees per terabyte or per node.

Commodity servers are widely available and effectively replace proprietary appliances, offering controlled-cost horizontal scaling.

Hadoop’s active community ensures a regular update cycle and a long project lifespan, mitigating the risk of abandonment or rapid obsolescence.

Separation of Storage and Compute and Engine Flexibility

With HDFS for storage and YARN for resource management, Hadoop decouples data from computing. This facilitates the use of multiple processing engines.

MapReduce remains the traditional engine for heavy batch processing, but you can easily substitute Spark, Tez, or other frameworks to optimize performance and reduce latency.

This modularity is particularly useful when requirements evolve or when experimenting with new tools without reengineering the entire platform.

Concrete Example

A research institution manages several petabytes of medical images and scientific archives in a Hadoop cluster. This organization was able to demonstrate that it kept storage costs at an attractive level while ensuring high redundancy and resilience to failures, validating the value of a Hadoop foundation for massive volumes.

Operational Limitations and Management Complexity of Hadoop

Operating a Hadoop cluster requires specialized skills and constant attention to system parameters. MapReduce, the default batch engine, quickly shows its limitations for real-time use cases.

Steep Learning Curve and Heavy Administration

Setting up a Hadoop cluster involves fine-tuning HDFS, YARN, ZooKeeper, and often peripheral tools (Oozie, Ambari). Teams must master multiple components and versions to ensure stability.

Updating a Hadoop ecosystem requires complex orchestration: check out our guide on updating software dependencies to secure your environment. A version change can impact compatibility between HDFS, YARN, and client libraries.

The pool of qualified administrators remains limited, which can extend recruitment times and increase salary costs. Each incident requires cross-layer diagnostics across multiple software layers.

Small File Problem and Fragmentation

HDFS is optimized for handling large blocks of several megabytes. When ingesting millions of small files, the NameNode can quickly exhaust its memory, leading to slowdowns or service outages.

Metadata management becomes a bottleneck: each file creates an entry, and an excessive file count fragments the architecture.

To work around this “small file problem,” container formats (SequenceFile, Avro, or Parquet) are used, but this complicates the ETL pipeline and lengthens the learning curve.

Batch Processing Versus Real-Time Needs

MapReduce, Hadoop’s default model, operates in batch mode: each job reads and writes to disk, resulting in heavy I/O. This choice negatively impacts time-to-insight when aiming for near real-time.

The lack of native caching mechanisms in MapReduce increases the cost of successive iterations on the same data. Exploratory workflows or iterative algorithms, such as those in machine learning, become very slow.

Combining Hadoop with Spark to accelerate processing requires managing an additional software layer, further complicating the architecture and operation.

Concrete Example

An insurance group encountered difficulties processing daily business streams that generated hundreds of thousands of small files each day. The load on the NameNode caused weekly outages and slowed down analytics report production, illustrating that file management and the native batch model can become a bottleneck in production.

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Modern Use Cases: Hadoop as a Base with Alternative Streaming

In hybrid architectures, Hadoop retains its role as a durable repository, while real-time streams are processed by streaming platforms. This approach combines batch robustness with responsiveness.

Integrating Kafka for Real-Time Ingestion

Apache Kafka captures and buffers events in real time before routing them to Hadoop. To learn more, see our article on event-driven architecture.

Data is initially stored in Kafka topics and then consumed by Spark Streaming or Flink jobs for immediate pre-processing. The consolidated results are ultimately persisted in HDFS or Hive.

This asynchronous ingestion pipeline safeguards the integrity of the data lake while providing real-time analytics capabilities on critical streams.

Using Spark and Flink to Accelerate Processing

Spark provides an in-memory engine, drastically reducing I/O compared to MapReduce. Spark jobs can be orchestrated via YARN and directly access data stored in HDFS.

Apache Flink, on the other hand, offers native continuous stream processing with checkpointing mechanisms, delivering low latency and high fault tolerance for demanding use cases.

These frameworks build on the existing Hadoop foundation without invalidating the initial investment and facilitate performance improvements and faster analytics updates.

Partial Migrations to Data Lakehouses

Facing agility constraints, some organizations keep HDFS for archiving while deploying a lakehouse engine (Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg) on Spark. They then benefit from ACID features, time travel, and schema management.

The lakehouse model on HDFS extends the cluster’s lifespan while providing smoother SQL and BI experiences, bringing the data lake closer to the capabilities of a data warehouse.

This gradual transition limits operational risk because it relies on the same components and skills as the initial Hadoop ecosystem.

Concrete Example

A logistics company implemented Kafka to capture real-time transit events, coupled with Spark Streaming for daily operational dashboards. Larger historical data remains on HDFS, demonstrating that combining Hadoop with streaming meets both responsiveness and durable retention needs.

Lakehouse and Cloud-Native Alternatives

Managed cloud platforms and lakehouse architectures offer an alternative to traditional Hadoop, combining agility, integrated governance, and reduced time-to-insight. However, they require an analysis of vendor lock-in risk.

Cloud Data Warehouse Versus Data Lakehouse

Cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Azure Synapse) offer a serverless model and usage-based billing without infrastructure management. They provide high-performance SQL, secure data sharing, and automatic scalability.

Managed lakehouses (Databricks, Amazon EMR with Delta Lake) maintain the openness of the data lake while adding transactionality, schema management, and performance through caching and query plan optimization. To discover how to structure your raw data, check out our guide on data wrangling.

The choice between a serverless data warehouse and a lakehouse depends on the nature of workloads, the need for flexibility, and the level of control desired over the environment.

Optimize Your Data Lake Foundation for Optimal Time-to-Insight

Hadoop remains a reliable and cost-effective foundation for managing very large data volumes, especially when employing a “write once, read many” approach and when real-time agility is not the main priority. However, operating it requires specialized skills, and its native MapReduce batch engine can become a bottleneck once real-time demands arise. Hybrid architectures combining Kafka, Spark, or Flink allow streaming workloads to be offloaded while retaining Hadoop for historical retention.

For organizations seeking greater agility, lakehouse or managed cloud platforms offer an attractive compromise between scalability, governance, and rapid deployment, provided that vendor lock-in risks and control requirements are carefully assessed.

Every context is unique: choosing a Big Data foundation, whether open source or managed, should be based on volume, processing cycles, internal expertise, and regulatory constraints. Our experts guide you in evaluating, architecting, and optimizing your data lake or lakehouse environment, always prioritizing openness and modularity.

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Mariami Minadze

Mariami is an expert in digital strategy and project management. She audits the digital ecosystems of companies and organizations of all sizes and in all sectors, and orchestrates strategies and plans that generate value for our customers. Highlighting and piloting solutions tailored to your objectives for measurable results and maximum ROI is her specialty.

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Green Software: When Sustainability Becomes a Competitive Advantage for Software

Green Software: When Sustainability Becomes a Competitive Advantage for Software

Auteur n°3 – Benjamin

The shift toward sustainable software is no longer just an eco-friendly trend; it has become a strategic lever for software vendors and CIOs. With IT accounting for nearly 4% of global emissions and representing about 35% of a tech company’s Scope 2 emissions, the pressure is mounting.

Between environmental certifications, customer expectations, soaring operating costs, and the risk of greenwashing, software sustainability now equates to resilience and performance. A structured approach can cut a software’s emissions by an average of 32% through code, architecture, cloud, and CI/CD pipeline optimizations. Here’s how to turn this challenge into a competitive edge.

Why Software Sustainability Is a Strategic Imperative

Software sustainability goes beyond a mere CSR commitment: it directly boosts performance and cuts costs. Regulatory pressure, growing customer demands, and the fight against greenwashing make Green Software a differentiator.

Regulatory Pressure and Customer Expectations

European and Swiss regulatory frameworks are evolving rapidly to govern digital carbon impact. CSR reports now require transparency on Scope 2 emissions tied to IT infrastructure and cloud services.

Executive teams and boards are integrating digital sustainability indicators into their dashboards. RFPs include ESG criteria, and end customers favor solutions proven for their digital sobriety.

In practice, ignoring these requirements can lead to lower rankings in public tenders or contract losses. Conversely, a certified, ultra-efficient software solution enhances credibility and market appeal.

Operational Cost Reduction

Reducing your digital footprint means lower energy consumption on servers, finer orchestration, and optimized storage. Every kilowatt-hour saved directly lowers the energy bill, even as cloud pricing continues to rise.

Internal studies show that optimizing queries, eliminating redundant processes, and reducing stored data volumes can cut CPU and memory consumption by nearly 30%. These savings translate into significantly lower monthly costs in production and test environments.

Beyond the cloud, a modular architecture aligned with actual usage volumes enables more precise resource sizing, avoiding overprovisioning. This active sobriety is a crucial budget-optimization lever in an inflationary context.

Competitive Advantage and Brand Image

Sustainability has become a buying criterion for many organizations—especially public agencies, local governments, and large corporations subject to ESG directives. Offering an eco-designed platform or application is a powerful sales argument.

Beyond RFPs, the ethical and responsible dimension enhances brand image. Communication campaigns highlighting reduced digital emissions resonate positively with stakeholders, including employees, investors, and end customers. This approach strengthens customer loyalty and trust.

Example: A Swiss SME developing a business solution partially rebuilt its application by targeting the most frequently used modules. By optimizing algorithms and deploying finer-grained autoscaling, it cut server consumption by 28% during peak loads. This result demonstrates that a Green Software approach bolsters competitiveness while improving customer satisfaction.

Measuring and Managing Software’s Environmental Impact

Measuring a software’s carbon footprint is the starting point for any Green Software initiative. Without reliable indicators and industry benchmarks, it’s impossible to focus on the most effective sobriety levers.

Measurement Approaches and Key Metrics

Several approaches quantify an application’s impact: estimates based on CPU and memory usage, direct measurement of network traffic, and evaluation of emissions from storage and bandwidth. Each method has its advantages and limitations.

Essential metrics include energy consumption in kilowatt-hours per transaction, average server resource utilization, and the share of renewable energy in the cloud infrastructure. Aggregating these data in a dashboard makes comparison and prioritization of actions easier.

Measurement granularity is crucial. An annual KPI masks usage variations and traffic spikes. It’s preferable to track metrics by service type, user story, and environment (dev, test, prod).

Tools and Cloud-Related Challenges

Major cloud providers offer energy consumption metrics, but transparency remains limited. Emission reports are often aggregated at the data-center level without client- or service-level breakdowns.

To address this opacity, open-source solutions are emerging that collect and process CPU, memory, and storage logs. They enrich provider data and enable direct correlation between consumption and application activity.

However, integrating these tools requires in-house or external expertise to calibrate measurements, interpret results, and adjust tolerance thresholds. Projects often stall at this stage due to lack of resources or dedicated skills.

Example of an Environmental Audit

A Swiss technology company specializing in cloud services commissioned an audit to assess its customer portal’s carbon footprint. The review focused on the most visited modules and the underlying architecture.

The audit measured energy consumption per request and identified bottlenecks caused by unoptimized SQL queries and database overprovisioning.

Based on this diagnosis, the vendor prioritized low-hanging-fruit fixes in its backlog: adding server-side caches, rewriting complex queries, and fine-tuning auto-scaling. These actions achieved a 24% emissions reduction on the portal in eight weeks, demonstrating the effectiveness of a targeted audit.

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Embedding Sobriety in the CI/CD Cycle and Architecture

Incorporating environmental checks into CI/CD pipelines ensures every change respects set emission thresholds. A modular, eco-designed architecture makes sobriety systemic.

Environmental Checks in Pipelines

Adding automated energy-consumption tests to each CI/CD pipeline measures the impact of commits before deployment. Thresholds are defined based on historical data and internal benchmarks.

If the maximum emissions threshold is exceeded, the pipeline blocks the merge and generates a report highlighting the code lines or cloud configurations responsible for the drift.

This “shift-left” approach makes developers accountable from the design phase. It encourages rethinking algorithms and choosing less resource-hungry solutions, while maintaining functional quality through standard tests.

Modular Architecture and Eco-Design

A monolithic architecture often overconsumes because every change requires redeploying the entire service. In contrast, microservices isolate the most used modules and allow deploying finer instances.

Eco-design goes beyond modularity: it means streamlining data flows, minimizing redundant processing, and optimizing exchange formats (lightweight JSON, compression).

Combining lightweight containers, orchestrators configured for automatic idle shutdown, and serverless functions for occasional tasks helps limit overall machine-hour consumption.

Cross-Functional Design and Development Guidelines

To make sobriety a shared practice, establish clear guidelines from the design phase. Every user story should include an “environmental impact” section assessed during backlog reviews.

UX teams are encouraged to limit media weight and favor light formats. Architects define optimized interservice communication patterns.

Developers receive training on efficiency metrics, selecting lightweight libraries, and managing threads and processes finely. Code reviews now include a sobriety checkpoint.

Overcoming Barriers: Expertise, Benchmarks, and Supply Chain

The main obstacles to Green Software are limited cloud-provider transparency, scarce internal expertise, and lack of reliable benchmarks. External support and industry benchmarks can clear these hurdles.

External Expertise and Tool Mastery

Engaging a Green Software consultancy or agency accelerates best-practice adoption. These experts bring measurement tools, audit scripts, and proven know-how.

They help calibrate tests, define business-context–appropriate metrics, and integrate measurements into deployment pipelines. They also train internal teams to sustain the initiative.

With this partnership, companies don’t have to build complex technical skills alone and can leverage market-wide experience.

Independent Evaluation of Cloud Providers

Cloud-provider data may lack granularity or transparency. Calling on a third-party assessor or independent lab verifies the real share of renewable energy and carbon performance of data centers.

This independent benchmark forms the basis for negotiating stricter environmental SLAs or shifting workloads to greener regions or hosts.

It secures CSR reporting and limits greenwashing risks in the digital supply chain, while boosting credibility with auditors and stakeholders.

Access to Comparative Industry Data

Industry benchmarks provide reference points for evaluating internal metrics. They show whether an application is average or overconsumes compared to peers.

By comparing results with similarly sized companies in the same sector, you avoid marginal optimizations and focus on high-impact levers.

These comparisons fuel ESG reports and offer concrete examples to highlight gains in annual reviews.

Green Software by Design for Peak Performance

Adopting a software sustainability approach means embedding environmental checks from the start, using a modular architecture, and sharing clear guidelines. Precisely measuring carbon footprint, managing it via CI/CD, and leveraging external experts can reduce emissions by an average of 32%.

Software sustainability isn’t a cost—it’s a business differentiator and a sign of technological maturity, enhancing competitiveness and the appeal of digital solutions.

Our experts are ready to support you in this transition and co-create a Green Software by Design strategy aligned with your business challenges and ESG goals.

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KYC (Know Your Customer): New Requirements and Strategic Challenges for Banks

KYC (Know Your Customer): New Requirements and Strategic Challenges for Banks

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

The requirements related to Know Your Customer (KYC) are undergoing a profound transformation by 2026, driven by stricter regulations, a continual rise in fraud, and the massive integration of artificial intelligence and automation.

At the same time, customers now demand a seamless and rapid experience, even within banking compliance processes. This article examines how KYC has become a strategic imperative, outlines the upcoming obligations, and highlights the technological solutions that enable financial institutions to balance security, agility, and customer satisfaction.

The Strategic Importance of KYC

KYC is no longer confined to onboarding; it has become a central pillar of risk management and customer relationship. Banks must now demonstrate a nuanced, dynamic understanding of their clients and detect atypical behavior in real time.

Evolution of KYC’s Role in Bank Governance

Originally designed as a formal step before opening an account, KYC has evolved into a continuous process that feeds the institution’s overall strategy.

Compliance teams work closely with risk and data departments to maintain a unified view of the customer. This synergy allows for more effective anticipation of fraud scenarios and better calibration of scoring models.

The strategic dimension of KYC is reflected in the integration of its data into executive dashboards, enhancing governance committees’ ability to make informed, swift decisions in response to market developments.

Continuous KYC: Towards Dynamic, Automated Monitoring

The concept of continuous KYC demands regular updates to customer information whenever new signals—transactions, profile changes, or external alerts—are detected. This dynamic monitoring closes blind spots and quickly identifies any changes in circumstances.

To ensure this responsiveness, banks deploy automated workflows that enrich customer data from internal and external sources in real time, while managing the necessary follow-ups with advisors.

Example: An e-commerce platform implemented a continuous KYC process based on transactional data flows and public-registry alerts. This approach reduced the average anomaly-detection time by 40%, demonstrating the effectiveness of a proactive rather than reactive strategy.

Real-Time Detection of Atypical Behavior

The shift toward 24/7 surveillance relies on analytical algorithms capable of instantly identifying emerging fraud patterns, whether unusual transaction structures or identity-theft attempts.

Alerting systems trigger targeted investigations or temporary blocks, ensuring no suspicious transaction slips through the net. This instantaneous response capability becomes a major competitive advantage.

By incorporating real-time risk scores, compliance teams can adjust alert thresholds based on customer segments and risk profiles, avoiding both excessive false positives and critical oversights.

Strict KYC Obligations for 2025–2026

The coming years will bring significantly tighter identity verification, screening, and traceability requirements. Banks must reinforce their technology stacks to meet these heightened standards.

Enhanced Identity Verification

Regulators now require the use of advanced biometric recognition methods combined with OCR to authenticate each identity document. Manual checks are no longer sufficient against the risks of digital identity theft and sophisticated document fraud.

Automated capture and analysis of documents ensure a reliability rate above 98%, while reducing examination time to mere seconds. This speed is essential for delivering a smooth customer experience without compromising security standards.

Institutions also need to archive this data immutably, ensuring audit compliance for several years, depending on jurisdictional requirements.

Automated Screening Against Sanctions and Politically Exposed Persons

Systematic screening of sanctions lists, politically exposed persons (PEPs), and international watchlists becomes mandatory for every profile update. Automation via API connectors is indispensable for continuously processing changes to these lists.

Technology solutions provide real-time alerts when a customer profile matches, enabling immediate, documented investigations.

This automated screening not only avoids delays but also limits the institution’s exposure to multi-million-dollar fines through strict compliance.

Full Auditability and Traceability of KYC

2026 regulations strengthen the obligation to maintain a complete, immutable history of every KYC action, from initial document collection to the latest verification.

Platforms must supply time-stamped, encrypted audit logs, ensuring transparency of processes during regulatory reviews. Non-compliance exposes the bank to severe penalties.

Example: A financial institution overhauled its infrastructure to integrate an internal ledger that meticulously traces each KYC step. This enhancement streamlined international audits and showcased the robustness of its framework to inspectors, bolstering partner confidence.

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Modernizing KYC with Technology

Automation and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing KYC—delivering speed, reliability, and cost savings. Modern banks incorporate these building blocks into a modular, scalable ecosystem.

Onboarding Automation and AI

Document capture via OCR combined with facial recognition can validate a new client in just minutes. AI-driven scoring engines instantly assess risk profiles and adjust the onboarding journey.

This automation drastically reduces cost per file while ensuring greater accuracy than manual checks. Account-opening abandonment rates drop, improving conversion.

Adaptive business rules ensure that only high-risk files are escalated automatically to an analyst, optimizing compliance-team productivity.

Integration with AML Systems and Risk Engines

KYC no longer operates in isolation: it connects to anti-money-laundering (AML) modules and transaction risk engines. This integration correlates customer data with financial flows, accelerating detection of suspicious patterns.

Banks with a harmonized ecosystem can trigger AML investigations automatically without re-entering information, reducing errors and delays.

This coupling strengthens the ability to produce consolidated regulatory reporting, essential for responding to authorities’ requests in hours rather than weeks.

Modular and Scalable KYC Platforms

Microservices-based architectures facilitate upgrading KYC modules by isolating each component—document verification, scoring, screening, or alert management. This modularity minimizes disruption during updates.

Open-source solutions promote flexibility and avoid vendor lock-in while leveraging a rich ecosystem of contributions. Institutions can then integrate specialized components incrementally.

Example: An industrial manufacturer chose an open-source, modular KYC platform supplemented by bespoke developments for its mobile channel. This contextual approach allowed rapid adaptation of the onboarding process for a new customer segment without a complete system overhaul.

Steer Your KYC Compliance Toward Strategic Excellence

KYC has become a lever of competitiveness and trust, combining regulatory rigor with an optimized customer experience. The upcoming 2025–2026 obligations demand robust, automated, continuously audited technology stacks. By adopting a modular architecture, open-source components, and artificial intelligence, banks gain efficiency, responsiveness, and risk control.

Our digital transformation experts guide you in defining and implementing your KYC strategy—from auditing your current setup to deploying the most innovative solutions tailored to your business context and ambitions.

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Mariami Minadze

Mariami is an expert in digital strategy and project management. She audits the digital ecosystems of companies and organizations of all sizes and in all sectors, and orchestrates strategies and plans that generate value for our customers. Highlighting and piloting solutions tailored to your objectives for measurable results and maximum ROI is her specialty.

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Digital Consultancy & Business (EN) Featured-Post-Transformation-EN

Process Thinking: Workflow Architecture as the True Engine of Transformation

Process Thinking: Workflow Architecture as the True Engine of Transformation

Auteur n°3 – Benjamin

In many companies, digitalization focuses on tools, organizational charts, or strategies, without ever questioning the processes that drive everyday work. Yet it is the workflows—often implicit, inherited, or fragmented—that link strategic ambition to operational reality. Ignoring their importance leads to breaks between teams, redundancies, resistance, and blind management.

To succeed, one must adopt an end-to-end vision, architect processes around the value created, establish clear ownership, implement continuous governance, and measure flows. Only an intelligent redesign of workflows makes transformation real, sustainable, and capable of continuous evolution.

The Risks of Implicit Workflows

When processes remain informal or inherited, transformation stalls despite new technologies. The lack of visibility into workflows creates silos, duplication, and friction points invisible to decision-makers.

Fragmented and Inherited Processes

In many organizations, workflows evolve through restructurings without ever being documented. Teams adapt each step according to their best practices, with no global coherence or strategic alignment.

This fragmentation results in wasted time and a lack of clarity: each department has its own version of the same process, making changes difficult to manage and align.

The legacies of outdated solutions or unupdated industry practices further complicate the implementation of unified tools. The dangers of lacking technical documentation within your IT systems hamper team skill development and scalability.

Duplicate Work and Team Disjunctions

Without clear mapping, some tasks are performed multiple times or follow suboptimal workarounds. Everyone re-enters, rephrases, or overlaps others’ work, leading to frustration and inefficiency.

A large Swiss logistics company discovered during an audit that two departments were each capturing the same data for different reports, doubling data-entry costs and extending the reporting cycle by 30%. This example illustrates how a lack of process transparency generates unnecessary effort and slows decision-making.

The result: longer lead times, increased error risk, and disengaged employees struggling to understand the real value of their contributions.

Resistance and Lack of Standardization

Informal processes give way to personal methods and individual preferences. Everyone defends their habits, making the transition to unified workflows hard to adopt.

Without proven standards, digital initiatives often rely on isolated pilots. When it’s time to scale, technical and organizational divergences derail projects.

Lack of guidelines on collaboration and information-sharing practices leads to costly trade-offs and backtracking, undermining confidence in any transformation initiative.

Building an End-to-End Process Architecture Aligned with Value

Rethinking workflows goes beyond documentation: it involves modeling real flows, identifying waste, and redesigning value streams. Process architecture must follow value creation, not the other way around.

Mapping Real Workflows through Process Mining

Process mining provides an objective snapshot of actual workflows by leveraging the digital footprints left by information systems. Gaps between the ideal process and the real process become clear, revealing undocumented workarounds.

This approach helps prioritize redesign initiatives based on volumes, lead times, and errors, guided by the digital roadmap guide.

A mid-sized manufacturer used process mining to analyze its order approval cycle. The study revealed resubmission loops that increased processing time by 40%. This example shows how data can guide trade-offs and focus resources on the most critical links.

Defining Redesigned Value Streams

Instead of mechanically transplanting existing workflows, you should rebuild value streams around business objectives and customer expectations. Each step must be designed to maximize utility and minimize handoffs.

The redesign draws on operational insights, user needs, and industry best practices to formulate an end-to-end, modular, and scalable process blueprint.

This contextual approach ensures that process architecture stays aligned with evolving corporate strategy and operational priorities.

Prioritizing Friction Points and Bottlenecks

Not all processes are equal: some inefficiencies have a greater impact on customer satisfaction, cost, or responsiveness. Mapping should include metrics such as throughput time, error rate, and unit cost.

By targeting bottlenecks and measuring their financial or operational impact, organizations can focus redesign efforts on high-leverage quick wins.

This prioritization, combined with a clear roadmap, fosters sponsor buy-in and ensures a controlled, step-by-step scaling of transformation.

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Establishing Roles and Process-Centered Governance

Clarity of responsibilities and regular governance forums are essential to anchor workflows over time. Without process owners and rituals, everything becomes vague once the novelty fades.

Process Owners and Clear Accountabilities

Each workflow should have an owner—a process owner or Chief Digital Officer—responsible for its performance and evolution. This cross-functional role ensures coherence across teams and prevents governance from getting lost in silos.

The process owner maintains procedures, facilitates feedback sessions, and approves change requests within a predefined framework.

This formal accountability boosts engagement, secures decision-making, and provides a single point of contact for all process-related inquiries.

Continuous Governance and Cross-Functional Rituals

Beyond the launch phase, it’s crucial to set up periodic steering committees bringing together the IT department, business units, and finance. These bodies review key performance indicators, approve initiatives, and adjust the roadmap.

Process review workshops led by process owners promote collaboration and the capitalization of best practices.

Flow-Oriented Metrics and KPIs

To manage workflows, you need flow-based indicators (lead time, error rate, cost per transaction) rather than functional or project metrics.

These KPIs must be accessible in near real time and automatically drawn from information systems to ensure optimal responsiveness.

Continuous monitoring of these KPIs allows for the rapid detection of deviations and the initiation of corrective actions before blockages become entrenched.

Workflow Redesign: Beyond Simple Digitalization

Simply transferring a paper or manual process into a digital tool without rethinking it results in ineffective digitalization. Innovation comes from redesign, not technological copy-paste.

Identifying and Eliminating Waste

Applying Lean to processes means eliminating any activity that doesn’t add value: document shuffling, re-entering data, redundant approvals, or unnecessary wait times.

By integrating this approach from the design phase, you significantly reduce idle time and improve overall workflow fluidity.

A Swiss transport company revamped its billing process by removing three manual approval steps and automating invoice delivery. This redesign halved the billing cycle and improved cash flow.

Testing and Iterating New Processes

Before rolling out a new process chain, it’s recommended to run a small-scale pilot.

This iterative approach limits adoption risks and fosters gradual team maturity using advanced Agile methods.

Adjustments made after the initial testing phases ensure a smooth experience tailored to the real-world context of end users.

Embedding Redesign in Culture and Skills

The continuous redesign of workflows must become reflexive, supported by training and change management. Teams need to understand optimization logic and know how to use modeling tools.

Skill development in BPMN, process mining, and Lean techniques is an investment that then permeates all transformation projects.

This enables the organization to gain sustainable agility, evolving processes according to needs and opportunities.

Turn Your Workflows into a Lever for Continuous Transformation

Rethinking your end-to-end processes, defining explicit roles, establishing flow governance, and integrating iterative redesign are key steps to make digital transformation tangible and sustainable. By aligning each workflow with value creation, you eliminate waste, strengthen collaboration, and accelerate decision-making.

Whether you’re a CIO, CTO, transformation leader, or executive, the mission is shared: embed workflows into strategy, organization, and culture to create a lasting competitive advantage. Our Edana experts can help you map, rethink, and manage your processes from diagnosis to industrialization.

Discuss your challenges with an Edana expert

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Digital Consultancy & Business (EN) Featured-Post-Transformation-EN

SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud: Accelerated Standardization… But What More Flexible, Scalable Alternatives?

SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud: Accelerated Standardization… But What More Flexible, Scalable Alternatives?

Auteur n°3 – Benjamin

The growing adoption of SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud reflects software vendors’ intent to enforce a uniform platform, managed and updated by themselves. Its rapid uptake is attractive thanks to a controlled total cost of ownership (TCO), accelerated roll-outs, and standardized security.

However, the “Adopt, not Adapt” model forces companies to align their processes with SAP’s standards, limiting future evolution, independence, and innovation potential. Before committing, it’s essential to assess the ERP’s flexibility and anticipate the risks of technological lock-in at both organizational and functional levels. This article unpacks the strengths and weaknesses of SAP Public Cloud and proposes more modular, sovereign alternatives.

Advantages of SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud

The solution delivers an industrialized implementation, drastically reducing deployment timelines. Its SaaS model guarantees continuous updates and centralized process management.

Rapid Deployment and Continuous Updates

Deployment of SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud relies on a catalog of preconfigured best practices for various industries. The standard modules cover a broad functional spectrum, avoiding the need to rebuild most end-to-end management processes.

Each update is scheduled by SAP, tested in advance, and deployed automatically, eliminating the need for heavy periodic migration plans. Companies benefit from regular enhancements without prolonged maintenance windows.

This automated support significantly lightens project workload, especially for SMEs and mid-sized enterprises that often lack dedicated internal upgrade teams. The result is a faster time-to-value.

For example, a mid-sized Swiss food processing company reduced its initial ERP project duration by 40% using exclusively SAP templates. This case demonstrates how standardization can simplify change management and limit configuration costs.

Lower TCO and Centralized Management

The Public Cloud model shifts infrastructure and maintenance costs to the vendor, converting CapEx into OpEx. For more advice on optimizing your cloud budget, consult our guide.

This approach frees IT departments from server operations, monitoring, and patching tasks. Teams can focus on higher-value activities, such as refining business processes.

Moreover, centralized governance simplifies process traceability and auditing. Integrated reports and dashboards provide a unified view of operational and financial performance.

A Swiss manufacturing SME achieved a 25% saving on its annual IT budget after migrating to SAP Public Cloud. These freed resources were redirected to advanced analytics projects.

Built-In Security and Standardized Compliance

SAP Public Cloud incorporates stringent security mechanisms: multi-factor authentication, encryption of data at rest and in transit, and 24/7 incident monitoring. This ensures a high level of protection without requiring in-house specialized expertise.

Regulatory requirements—GDPR, ISO standards, and sector-specific mandates—are handled by SAP’s Security Operations Center. To learn how to implement proper cyber risk management, see our guide.

Security patch management follows automated update cycles, reducing vulnerability windows. IT teams no longer need to schedule production downtime for critical patches.

A Swiss professional services group saw security incidents drop by 60% in one year, thanks to built-in security and automated updates.

“Adopt, not Adapt”: A Simple but Rigid Model

The “Adopt, not Adapt” principle eliminates customization, forcing companies into SAP’s standard framework. This uniformity restricts future flexibility and can lead to significant lock-in.

Loss of Flexibility for Specific Business Processes

When the standard model doesn’t cover certain critical steps, organizations must reshape their methods to match SAP, potentially sacrificing unique requirements. This can affect operational performance and user satisfaction.

Complex or atypical workflows are hard to implement, as any deviation requires rethinking the process or resorting to costly extensions. Large enterprises sometimes negotiate exceptions, but SMEs and mid-sized firms rarely secure such concessions.

This rigidity forces a compromise: accept a one-size-fits-all process or develop external overlays that weaken the ecosystem and increase technical debt.

A Swiss insurance company, faced with a highly specific claims settlement process, had to abandon several internal automations to comply with SAP workflows. This organizational adaptation delayed the go-live by three months.

Lock-In and Dependence on SAP’s Roadmap

Heavy reliance on native features ties the company closely to the vendor’s defined scope. Any new functionality must align with SAP’s roadmap, limiting internal initiatives.

Over time, this unbalanced relationship deepens dependence: exit or workaround costs become prohibitive if you wish to switch systems or augment the ERP with third-party solutions. To assess these costs, see our guide on the ROI of an ERP project.

Cultural Shift Toward Standardization

Adopting the standard demands a major cultural transformation: business and IT teams must abandon long-standing practices, often triggering change resistance.

Success thus relies more on change management than on technology. Training, workshops, and internal champions are critical to embedding the new standardized logic.

Without appropriate project governance and executive sponsorship, adoption can become forceful, leading to delays, dissatisfaction, and even partial abandonment of the solution.

As a case in point, a Swiss public institution had to engage nearly thirty key users for six months to realign its processes with SAP before relaunching the project with dedicated change-management support.

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Toward a Composable Architecture: Microservices and API-First

Breaking the ERP into independent services enables domain-driven evolution. An API-first approach facilitates progressive integration and modularity.

Functional Decoupling and Domain-Driven Evolution

By isolating each business function into a microservice, organizations can evolve their systems incrementally. To delve deeper into hexagonal architecture and microservices, see our dedicated article.

Each microservice maintains its own development, testing, and deployment cycle, speeding time-to-market for new domain-specific features.

This granularity avoids full-ERP redeployments for single changes. Impacts remain confined, and patches can be applied continuously without disrupting the overall ecosystem.

Additionally, modularity simplifies technology swaps: a component can be replaced by a higher-performing or open-source alternative with minimal dependencies.

Progressive Integration with the Existing ERP

SAP Public Cloud’s open APIs allow microservices to connect to the ERP core. Data exchanges use standards like OData or REST, ensuring compatibility and traceability. For robust API testing, consult our guide.

When a domain migrates to a microservice, processes are orchestrated via middleware or an event bus. This ensures asynchronous, resilient communication between components.

This in-place strategy limits initial rework: the ERP stays at the heart of operations, while extensions are added as needed without a global overhaul.

A Swiss logistics provider developed a warehouse management microservice, coupled via API to SAP’s core module. The four-month deployment showed hybrid coexistence works without service interruption.

Open-Source ERP and Hybrid Platforms: Regaining Freedom

Open-source solutions and hybrid clouds offer controlled customization and lower licensing costs. Adopting a mixed ecosystem preserves digital sovereignty and flexibility.

Odoo and ERPNext for a Modular Foundation

Odoo and ERPNext provide granular modules covering finance, inventory, CRM, and production. To compare options, see our article on open-source vs proprietary ERP.

The open-source codebase allows feature adaptation without relying on a vendor roadmap. Active communities offer a wealth of certified plugins and regular updates.

Low licensing costs—often limited to support—free up budget for custom development and business-specific adaptations.

These alternatives suit organizations seeking a complete ERP core while retaining the freedom to tailor processes and integrate third-party tools without constraints.

Native Cloud Stack and Controlled Customization

Serverless platforms, containers, and event-driven functions enable building an ERP by assembling best-of-breed services. To understand cloud hosting vs on-premise, see our guide.

This “best-of-breed” approach avoids monolithic architecture: maintenance, scaling, and security are handled by specialized, optimized components.

Usage-based pricing reduces TCO when workloads fluctuates. Organizations can scale up or down without renegotiating a global contract.

With this flexibility, IT leaders maintain control over architecture, choose their monitoring, logging, and CI/CD tools, and avoid vendor lock-in.

Domain-Driven Approach: ERP as a Component

Leveraging Domain-Driven Design (DDD), organizations clearly model each business context. The ERP becomes a component among others, like CRM or payroll modules.

Each bounded context has its own data model and services, fostering team autonomy and functional coherence.

Exchanges occur via API contracts or events, ensuring each domain evolves according to its own roadmap. This reduces technical debt and secures future transitions.

This strategic alignment creates an evolutive ecosystem where the standard ERP coexists with custom, open-source, or third-party solutions to form a truly sovereign architecture.

Build an ERP Architecture That Is Both Standardized and Agile

Successful ERP projects hinge not just on vendor selection but on a target architecture balanced between standardization and modularity. SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud provides a robust, secure foundation ideal for organizations ready to adopt fixed best practices. Meanwhile, composable architectures, open-source solutions, and hybrid platforms serve as levers to preserve flexibility, independence, and accelerated innovation cycles.

Before embarking on your transformation, clarify your strategic processes, tolerance for lock-in, and autonomy ambitions. A contextualized technology roadmap aligned with your business priorities ensures agility and digital sovereignty.

Our experts are ready to co-design a tailor-made ERP architecture combining the best of SAP standards and open alternatives. Every project is unique: we adapt our approach to maximize your return on investment and support sustainable growth.

Discuss your challenges with an Edana expert