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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

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

Contract Automation: The New Lever for Reducing Risks and Increasing Productivity

Contract Automation: The New Lever for Reducing Risks and Increasing Productivity

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

In many organizations, contract management remains an archaic process where Word, email, and spreadsheets form an inefficient tangle. Yet every contract marks the starting point of revenue, cost commitments, and legal risks.

Automating this contract flow is not about digitizing documents: it’s about establishing a nervous system that streamlines transactions, reduces errors, and provides complete traceability. This article shows how to transform a manual, slow, and opaque cycle into a data-driven contract workflow, securing governance and accelerating business performance.

Contracts as a Business Flow

Contracts symbolize the start of revenue generation and the trigger for costs, while they also underpin contractual risk. Optimizing them directly impacts revenue, productivity, and legal security.

Contracts and Revenue Generation

In the sales cycle, the contract is the realization of the commercial promise. It formalizes the agreed pricing, timelines, and service levels (SLAs). The time spent drafting and approving clauses can delay go-live and negatively affect cash flow.

By automating contract generation from the CRM and pre-approved templates, the creation process becomes instantaneous. Sales teams access pre-approved clauses, avoiding tedious negotiations over formatting or content.

Fast, standardized processing reduces time-to-revenue. Teams focus on value negotiation instead of document formatting.

Contracts and Operational Risk Management

Every contract contains essential clauses to ensure regulatory compliance and limit legal exposure. Omissions or contradictory versions can lead to costly disputes, fines, or service interruptions.

Automation enforces risk matrices and internal rules consistently. Sensitive clauses – confidentiality, SLAs, penalties – are locked based on the signatory’s profile and the committed amount.

This built-in control drastically reduces errors and ensures ongoing compliance, strengthening governance and lowering litigation risk.

Contracts and Partner Relationship Quality

Supplier or client relationships are based on trust and transparency. A slow or fragmented contracting process can undermine perceived professionalism and generate frustration.

Automation centralizes annex tracking, approval history, and key dates. At each step, the system automatically notifies stakeholders of required actions.

This fluidity improves partner satisfaction and establishes a long-term relationship founded on shared visibility and increased responsiveness.

Example

Example: A mid-sized Swiss industrial company had a legal department overwhelmed by manual supplier contract management. Approvals involved multiple back-and-forths, and annexes got lost in emails. By implementing a contract automation tool, it reduced its approval cycle by 40% and regained complete document traceability. This example shows that contract management can become a governance lever rather than a constraint.

Integrated Contract Flow

Moving from a series of manual, siloed steps to a fully orchestrated contract flow optimizes every phase. Each action becomes traceable, measurable, and secure, from the initial template to final signature.

Modeling and Automatic Generation

Contract creation starts with selecting a template tailored to the commercial and regulatory context. Each template includes standardized clauses validated by the legal department.

An automatic generation module populates these templates with data from the CRM or ERP, ensuring consistency and accuracy. Customizable fields are protected by compliance rules.

The result is a ready-to-send document, with no manual intervention and no formatting errors.

Approval Orchestration

Validations often involve multiple departments (sales, finance, legal, management). Without automation, requests get stuck in inboxes and follow-ups multiply.

A configurable workflow defines approval rules based on amount, contract type, or signatory profile. Each stage triggers automatic notifications and scheduled reminders.

This makes the process more fluid and transparent, significantly reducing approval times.

Tracking, E-Signature, and Smart Storage

Integrated electronic signature ensures the signatory’s authenticity and an irrefutable timestamp. Once signed, the document is archived in a repository where metadata is used for reporting.

Automated alerts notify stakeholders several weeks before expiration or renewal dates. Dashboards provide real-time visibility into costs, risks, and deadlines.

Dashboards provide real-time visibility into costs, risks, and deadlines.

Example

Example: A financial services provider had a slow, fragmented signing process between its CRM and email. By integrating an automated Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution into its CRM, contracts generated in real time adhered to risk matrices and embedded negotiated SLAs. The integration cut the signing cycle by 50% and provided a consolidated dashboard of commitments. This example illustrates the value of an integrated flow, from generation to contractual reporting.

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The True ROI of Automated Contracts

Tangible benefits include 30–70% reductions in creation time and 50% faster approval cycles. Less visible impacts, such as operational continuity and fewer disputes, sustainably enhance competitiveness.

Immediate Measurable Gains

Centralizing templates and automating generation can save 30–70% of drafting time. Data entry errors and missing clauses drop dramatically.

Approval orchestration shortens validation times by more than 50%, freeing legal teams and managers for higher-value tasks.

Administrative costs fall as manual follow-ups and version management disappear.

Invisible Benefits and Risk Mitigation

Beyond the numbers, automation provides real-time visibility into contractual risk. Compliance obligations (GDPR, ISO standards, FINMA) are monitored without manual intervention.

Tracking contractual obligations and deadlines prevents disputes and strengthens client/supplier relationships.

Dependence on a single expert or contract publisher vanishes, ensuring continuity even during prolonged absences.

Impact on Cross-Functional Productivity

Business teams gain direct access to contracts, annexes, and change histories. Purchasing, sales, and HR processes are no longer held up by manual approvals or document searches.

Integrating contractual data into the CRM/ERP feeds financial and operational dashboards, enabling decision-making based on reliable indicators.

Comprehensive traceability enhances interdepartmental collaboration and reduces silos, boosting overall efficiency.

Example

Example: A Swiss industrial group measured a 60% reduction in contract creation time and a 40% drop in disputes caused by misapplied clauses. Real-time reporting on renewals lowered the risk of unintended service disruptions. This example shows that invisible gains are as crucial as time savings.

Securing and Scaling Contracts

Contract automation is not just a legal matter: it’s an operational lever for deploying scalable, robust workflows. It strengthens compliance, auditability, and integrates into the overall IT system to support digital transformation.

Sales Scalability and IT System Robustness

As sales grow, the number of contracts to process rises exponentially. A manual process quickly becomes a bottleneck, hampering growth.

An automated, modular, and scalable system can handle large volumes of transactions simultaneously, without compromising timing or compliance controls.

This scalability supports geographic expansion and intensive sales campaigns.

Enhanced Compliance and Auditability

Regulatory requirements and audit standards demand full traceability of decisions and contract changes.

Each action is recorded in an immutable log, ensuring evidence availability during external audits.

Smart archiving and version control allow quick retrieval of a contract’s state at a specific date, guaranteeing transparency and compliance.

CRM/ERP Integration and Cross-Functional Governance

Centralizing contractual data in the CRM or ERP automatically feeds financial indicators, performance dashboards, and procurement processes.

Connected cross-functional workflows ensure that every contract event (signature, renewal, modification) triggers appropriate actions in other systems.

Governance is formalized with clearly defined roles, rights, and responsibilities, ensuring agile and secure management.

Turn Your Contract Management into a Competitive Advantage

Automating contracts goes far beyond digitization: it deploys a digital nervous system that streamlines your business flows, secures your organization, and reduces operational costs. This ROI-focused approach is a pillar of enterprise-wide digital transformation and a lever for sustainable competitiveness.

Standardization, governance, and CRM/ERP integration are key to moving from a fragile manual process to a scalable, traceable system. Companies investing in contract automation today gain speed, compliance, and business agility, while others remain trapped in slow and risky systems.

Our Edana experts, leveraging an open-source, modular, and contextual approach, support organizations in implementing secure, automated contract workflows tailored to your business challenges. Together, let’s give your contract management the robustness and performance it deserves.

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

How Digitalization Increases a Company’s Value: Efficiency, Data, CX, Tech Assets, and IP

How Digitalization Increases a Company’s Value: Efficiency, Data, CX, Tech Assets, and IP

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

In an environment where competition is intensifying and investors scrutinize every performance metric, digitalization stands out as a true lever for value creation in businesses. Beyond a mere project execution model, it influences all strategic dimensions: productivity, operational quality, customer satisfaction, and innovation.

By optimizing processes, leveraging data, and building proprietary technology assets, digitalization contributes to higher market valuations. This article explores how each digital building block—from automation to intellectual property—helps grow an organization’s value, illustrated with concrete examples from the Swiss economic landscape.

Process Optimization and Operational Performance

Digitalization streamlines internal workflows and reduces execution times. Each automation and integrated business tool boosts overall efficiency and lowers operational costs.

Smart Automation and Modular ERPs

Targeted automation of repetitive tasks delivers significant time savings for operational teams. It structures workflows around modular, scalable Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems tailored to specific business needs. By isolating low-value tasks, staff can focus on high-impact strategic missions.

Open-source ERPs, complemented by custom modules, offer appreciated flexibility in hybrid environments. Open-source ERPs avoid vendor lock-in while ensuring controlled scalability. Maintenance and upgrades then fit naturally into a defined and prioritized roadmap.

A typical Swiss industrial manufacturer recently deployed an open-source ERP coupled with automated order-planning scripts. This initiative cut order processing times by 30% and reduced stock-management errors by 20%. The example shows how a modular approach plus automation frees up resources for innovation.

Collaborative Tools and Mobile Applications

Adopting cloud-native collaborative tools improves coordination across departments and increases process transparency. Document-sharing platforms, internal chat systems, and integrated videoconferencing streamline communications. Teams gain agility and responsiveness when unexpected situations arise.

Industry-specific mobile apps complete this ecosystem by providing instant access to critical data. They enable decision-making in the field, shrinking the gap between incident detection and resolution. With secure APIs, they integrate seamlessly with existing back-office solutions.

A logistics provider in French-speaking Switzerland rolled out a secure mobile app for delivery management. Drivers access schedules in real time, adjust routes, and confirm deliveries via QR codes. This digitalization improved on-time performance by 25% and reduced return rates by 15%, demonstrating the direct impact of a mobile tool on operational performance.

Streamlined Workflows and Integrated Reporting

Consolidating processes on a single platform enables monitoring of all key indicators. Customized dashboards, connected to ERP and CRM systems, offer a consolidated view of operational and financial performance. Leadership teams can steer activities based on reliable, real-time data.

Automating reporting eliminates manual data collection and review tasks. Daily or weekly KPI updates occur transparently without human intervention. This data reliability builds trust among decision-makers and accelerates the decision-making process.

For instance, a Swiss services company unified its financial and operational reporting on a locally hosted platform. Productivity, cost, and quality indicators update automatically each night. The system detected a budget overrun in a cost center, reducing the forecast variance by 10% the following quarter.

Enhanced Customer Experience through Digitalization

A seamless, personalized customer experience becomes a major differentiator. Omnichannel journeys and digital services boost satisfaction and loyalty.

Chatbots and Omnichannel Interactions

AI-driven chatbots provide 24/7 support for routine inquiries, alleviating support teams. They handle simple requests instantly and escalate to a human advisor when needed. This responsiveness builds trust and lowers visitor abandonment rates.

All communication channels—website, mobile app, social media, instant messaging—are unified in a centralized CRM platform. Contact histories are accessible with one click, ensuring consistent responses across touchpoints. The customer relationship becomes smoother and more relevant.

A Swiss financial services provider implemented a chatbot that answers common questions about banking products and credit simulators. Upon launch, the bot handled 40% of inquiries without human intervention and maintained a 92% satisfaction rate. This example highlights omnichannel engagement’s effectiveness in boosting customer involvement.

Online Ordering Journeys and Digital CRM

Digitizing the purchase journey—from product selection to invoicing—speeds up conversions. Smart forms and secure payment modules simplify the experience. Each step is optimized to reduce friction and minimize cart abandonment.

The digital CRM collects behavioral and transactional data to personalize offerings. Targeted marketing campaigns leverage refined segments, generating higher open and click-through rates. This analytical granularity increases the ROI of commercial initiatives.

A B2B sales platform in German-speaking Switzerland revamped its ordering funnel by integrating multiple payment methods and an instant quotation system. Conversion rates rose by 18% in three months, illustrating how a streamlined interface and connected CRM can transform the purchasing experience.

After-Sales Follow-Up and Digital Loyalty

Digital engagement doesn’t end at the sale: after-sales follow-up via a client portal and automated notifications enhances long-term satisfaction. Claim and warranty workflows are structured, ensuring transparency and traceability. Processing times shrink.

Surveys and feedback are collected directly through digital channels, enabling rapid adjustments. CSAT and NPS scores are monitored in real time, guiding continuous improvement initiatives. Digital proximity strengthens customer engagement.

A Swiss insurance company launched an online client area for claims reporting and case tracking. Policyholders receive automatic updates at each processing step. The solution increased customer retention by 35% and reduced average resolution time by 25%.

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Data as a Strategic Lever

Mastering data turns information into a competitive advantage. Robust governance and advanced analytics optimize offerings and accelerate decision-making.

Data Governance and Quality

Implementing governance processes ensures data reliability and regulatory compliance. Cataloging, cleansing, and traceability rules build a solid foundation for analysis. Trust in data is essential for deploying a data-driven strategy. To delve deeper into data governance, explore best practices in the data mesh model.

Centralized repositories combined with security and privacy policies prevent silos and duplicates. Business and IT teams collaborate to define quality standards and performance metrics. This coherence maximizes data value.

A Swiss public institution centralized its customer and transactional data sources in a secure data lake. Automated validation and monitoring workflows boosted data compliance from 65% to 95% within six months. This rigor ensured reliable performance and compliance reporting.

Analytics and Decision-Making

Self-service analytics tools empower business units to explore data independently of IT. Interactive dashboards deliver immediate insights into sales, production, or user behavior. Managers can adjust strategies in real time. To design interactive dashboards, follow our UX best practices.

Incorporating machine learning for scoring, demand forecasting, and anomaly detection enhances analytical value. Predictive models anticipate trends and guide investments. This proactivity strengthens market positioning.

A Swiss SME in the food sector deployed an analytics platform to forecast demand fluctuations. Forecasts reduced waste by 22% and optimized supply chain management. This example shows the direct impact of a data-driven approach on cost control and performance.

Data-Driven Agility

Data feeds roadmaps and innovation processes. Continuously measured KPIs guide priorities, including A/B testing. The organization becomes more responsive, adapting offerings and processes based on market feedback.

The data-driven feedback loop concept enables rapid prototyping and iteration. Decisions are backed by quantitative evidence, reducing uncertainty and risk. This dynamic fosters experimentation and continuous improvement.

For example, a Swiss energy services operator established a quarterly prototype launch cycle based on customer tests. Indicators gathered allowed three times faster iteration than before, accelerating the rollout of new connected services. This illustrates the value of a data-guided organization.

Building Intangible Assets and Intellectual Property

Developing proprietary digital solutions creates valuable technological assets. Owning intellectual property enhances agility and market appeal.

Designing Internal Platforms and Microservices

Building custom business platforms yields solutions aligned with strategic needs. Independent microservices provide strong modularity and simplify technical evolution. Each service can be optimized, scaled, or replaced without affecting the whole.

This approach avoids technological lock-in from proprietary solutions. Teams retain full control of code and architecture. Development and deployment flexibility become a competitive advantage.

A Swiss logistics player developed an internal shipment-tracking platform based on microservices. Each module handles a process segment: booking, transport, delivery, and billing. Modularity allowed rapid addition of an advanced tracing service for a major client, demonstrating swift adaptability.

Intellectual Property and Competitive Advantage

Valuing an intangible asset on the balance sheet relies on documentation, legal protection, and code security. Copyright and internal licensing grant temporary exclusivity for usage and commercialization.

Owning software assets paves the way for partnerships, third-party licensing, and better valuation during fundraising or sale. Investors factor these intangible assets into market value assessments.

A Swiss tech SME patented several modules of its industrial energy-management calculation engine. These modules, integrated into its main application, were recognized as capitalizable intangible assets, increasing company valuation by 15% in a funding round. The example underscores the importance of formalizing and protecting digital assets.

Reducing Dependencies and Controlling Costs

Developing in-house tools cuts reliance on external providers and costly licenses. Maintenance and licensing expenses are controlled long term. Updates align with a comprehensive strategic vision.

Acquired flexibility allows rapid pivots in response to regulatory changes or new business needs. Teams can prioritize developments based on expected ROI.

For example, a Swiss B2B services group replaced multiple third-party solutions with an internal software core. The transition saved CHF 120,000 in annual licensing fees and enabled new business features at no extra cost. Full code control translated into greater agility during tender responses.

Accelerate Your Valuation through Comprehensive Digitalization

Digitalization is not just an IT project but a cross-functional approach that optimizes processes, enriches customer experience, leverages data, and builds sustainable technology assets. By integrating these levers, a company becomes more productive, agile, and attractive to investors.

Edana’s experts support executive teams and CIOs in defining coherent roadmaps, implementing modular open-source solutions, and securing intangible assets. Transform your digitalization challenges into a true value multiplier.

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.

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

How a Customer Portal Creates Value and Transforms the User Experience

How a Customer Portal Creates Value and Transforms the User Experience

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

A customer portal is more than just a technical interface: it becomes a true strategic product when it combines user-friendliness with organizational efficiency. By providing instant access to information and increased autonomy, it generates immediate value while reducing support burdens.

To succeed, it rests on two inseparable pillars: a clear, tangible benefit for each user profile and a progressive access model ensuring a secure ramp-up of features. Beyond technical implementation, its success requires rigorous governance, objective management methods and a scalable delivery model aligned with the business vision.

Clear User Benefits to Drive Adoption

A customer portal must deliver immediate, measurable gains for users. It drives adoption by quickly resolving everyday pain points.

Reduced Inquiries and Self-Service Support

By offering a centralized space, the portal lowers the number of support requests. Users find answers and guides on their own, easing the assistance teams’ workload.

Dynamic FAQs and embedded tutorials cut wait times, resulting in higher satisfaction and lower support costs. This newfound autonomy also boosts clients’ digital confidence.

This result demonstrates that targeted use of self-service tools frees technical teams and enhances the customer journey.

Instant Access to Documents and Certificates

Content-rich portals enable users to instantly download contractual documents, certificates or reports. There’s no need to wait for an email or phone call.

This uninterrupted availability makes the user experience seamless: each document is accessible in a few clicks, with guaranteed validity and real-time updates.

An industrial SME in Switzerland reduced quality certificate delivery times by 70 %, showing that digitizing document workflows accelerates time to market and strengthens satisfaction among demanding partners.

Autonomous License and Workflow Management

For organizations managing numerous software licenses or products requiring renewal, the portal offers a self-service dashboard. Users can activate, deactivate or update their entitlements without external intervention.

This autonomy prevents workflow disruptions and ensures operational continuity. Automated deadline tracking and renewals eliminate surprises and service interruptions.

A Swiss healthcare provider implemented this type of portal, allowing its field teams to manage their own access rights. As a result, urgent requests dropped by 55 % and access traceability improved.

Minimal Entry Barriers with a Progressive Access Model

Removing adoption hurdles means streamlined onboarding and gradual trust levels. The portal instantly grants basic features while protecting sensitive data.

Single Sign-On and Seamless Integration

SSO lets users log in with existing credentials, whether from an internal Active Directory or an external identity provider. The experience remains consistent and secure.

This integration reduces setup time and the number of passwords to remember, boosting engagement from first login. IT teams also benefit from centralized access management and security policies.

A major Swiss service group found that SSO halved the onboarding abandonment rate. This case proves that smooth access fosters user engagement and simplifies identity management.

The transparent integration of systems further reduces technical complexity and delivers a cohesive experience.

Gradual Trust Levels and Privilege Escalation

The trust model is based on authentication levels matched to action criticality. Only sensitive features require a second factor or additional validation.

This granular approach balances accessibility with security: users start quickly with limited scope, then gain permissions as their trust and training grow.

In a Swiss financial organization, this system enabled phased access to confidential reports without immediately imposing strong authentication on every user. The result shows that gradual privilege escalation reassures without hindering usage.

Optimized Onboarding Experience

Onboarding includes interactive formats: short videos, smart checklists and guided tours tailored to each user profile. Each step offers a concrete, contextual benefit.

Progressive information collection avoids initial overload and allows interface personalization based on real needs. Users feel supported, boosting confidence and retention rates.

A Swiss insurance company deployed a virtual assistant during registration, providing a mini-tutorial at each new login. The portal achieved a 92 % onboarding completion rate, proving the effectiveness of a progressive, personalized journey.

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Governance and Methods to Align Teams and Priorities

Implementing a customer portal requires clear governance and agile processes to prioritize developments. Continuous business involvement ensures responses match real needs.

Objective Prioritization with WSJF

WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) ranks features by relative business value, delay cost and development duration. Teams thus focus on the most impactful initiatives.

This method avoids endless debates and aligns decisions with quantifiable criteria. The backlog flows smoothly, releases become more predictable and delivered value grows more tangible.

A Swiss public transport operator adopted WSJF to orchestrate its portal versions. Within three months, perceived user value increased by 25 %, demonstrating that fact-based prioritization boosts delivery efficiency.

Business Involvement and Co-Design

Rather than separating IT and business divisions, the project regularly brings together business owners, UX designers and developers. They co-create user stories, test prototypes and continuously adjust features.

This collaborative approach reduces unnecessary iterations and ensures each update meets a real field need. Stakeholders feel invested and adoption rates for new features improve significantly.

A Swiss higher education institution formed a mixed committee to steer the portal. Thanks to monthly co-design workshops, feedback was integrated in real time, resulting in an 85 % usage rate among students and teachers.

Shared Objectives via OKRs

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) set ambitious, measurable goals shared by all teams. Everyone understands how their contributions impact the portal’s overall success.

Regular KR (Key Result) tracking creates an agile review cadence, enabling quick priority adjustments. Teams become more unified and focused on the same strategic vision.

A Swiss banking institution structured its transformation program around OKRs, positioning the customer portal as a central pillar. In six months, the release cycle sped up by 30 % and internal satisfaction rose by 20 %, proving the effectiveness of this governance framework.

Sustainable Scalability: Local Expertise and Global Delivery Model

To support portal growth, a hybrid delivery model combining critical local skills with nearshore support is essential. Agility and scalability become sustainable.

Local Cross-Functional Teams

Key competencies—architecture, security, UX and integration—remain local to ensure responsiveness and contextual understanding. Business experts directly participate in design workshops.

This proximity facilitates decision-making, enables quick support and ensures compliance with local legal and regulatory requirements.

In a Swiss cantonal authority, a dedicated local core team adjusted the portal within hours during a crisis, demonstrating the value of an on-site responsive team.

Synergy with a Nearshore Team

To support development volume and optimize costs, a nearshore team works on standardized modules and maintenance tasks. Coordination is maintained through agile rituals and a shared tracking platform.

This synergy offers budget flexibility and ensures continuous delivery, while preserving technical coherence and quality through cross-team code reviews.

A Swiss logistics solutions provider integrated a nearshore center to accelerate non-sensitive enhancements. It doubled its deployment pace without increasing fixed costs, maintaining high quality standards.

Hybrid Model for Longevity

The delivery model combines the agility of an iterative approach with the robustness of long-term planning. Roadmaps integrate user feedback, performance indicators and business needs.

Teams leverage DevOps and CI/CD to automate testing, deployments and monitoring. Technical debt is continuously monitored and addressed before it hinders innovation.

This hybrid organization ensures the portal’s scalability, resilience and adaptability to future business changes, while maintaining an optimal balance between cost and performance.

Make Your Customer Portal a Strategic Product

A successful customer portal is neither an isolated IT project nor just a front office. It’s a strategic product that aligns user experience, internal efficiency and business vision. Its value lies in immediate user benefits, a progressive access model, clear governance and continuous growth.

Structuring your teams, adopting objective methods like WSJF and OKRs, and deploying a hybrid global delivery model are key levers to sustain your portal and turn it into a digital performance accelerator.

Our Edana experts are ready to support you in designing, implementing and evolving your customer portal, combining open source, modularity and security.

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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

How the Pareto Principle Transforms Time and Priority Management in Business

How the Pareto Principle Transforms Time and Priority Management in Business

Auteur n°3 – Benjamin

In an environment where every minute counts and pressure to deliver results is rising, the Pareto law, or 80/20 principle, becomes a strategic lever for organizations. More than just an individual productivity hack, it guides project structuring, resource allocation and decision-making within teams.

By focusing on high-value activities, companies reduce operational waste and enhance overall performance. This article explores how the 80/20 rule applies to organizational processes, digital automation and the identification of the key “20%” through data, while showing how a custom system can amplify this effect.

Organizational Impact: Structuring Work and Making Effective Trade-Offs

The 80/20 rule guides project prioritization and directs resources toward high-impact initiatives. It frees teams from superfluous tasks and heightens their focus on strategic objectives.

Project Prioritization Based on Generated Value

By applying the Pareto law, decision-makers quickly identify the initiatives that deliver 80% of the benefits for just 20% of the effort. This approach requires a precise inventory of ongoing projects and a scoring system based on business impact (revenue, customer satisfaction, delivery times).

Rather than spreading energy across numerous streams, this framework emphasizes task prioritization and allocates resources to the most promising projects. Leadership thus aligns IT, marketing and operations roadmaps.

By holding regular prioritization reviews, the company ensures dynamic trade-offs that adapt to market fluctuations while preventing budget overruns.

Resource Allocation and Team Capacity

Once priorities are set, the 80/20 rule provides a framework for assigning skills and working hours. Managers assess what percentage of effort goes toward key initiatives and reassign resources as needed.

This prevents headcount fragmentation and reduces the cognitive load associated with multitasking. Teams freed from low-ROI tasks see their efficiency grow.

With agile governance, managers continuously adjust allocations based on evolving performance indicators, ensuring optimal responsiveness.

Enhancing Collective Efficiency

By targeting the most profitable levers, the 80/20 rule helps eliminate time wasted in unproductive meetings or cumbersome processes. Workflows are streamlined and documented, facilitating cross-functional understanding between business units and IT.

A mid-sized mechanical engineering firm conducted an 80/20 analysis of its R&D processes. It found that 20% of its products generated 80% of its commercial value. Consequently, it refocused its teams on these lines, cutting development cycle times by 30% and boosting customer satisfaction by 15%. This example highlights the power of data-driven prioritization.

Beyond quantitative gains, this focus strengthens employee engagement, as staff clearly see objectives and understand the relevance of their tasks.

Reducing Operational Waste: Optimizing Existing Processes

A rigorous ABC analysis of activities eliminates superfluous tasks and concentrates efforts on core workflows. It uncovers hidden costs and speeds up operational execution.

ABC Analysis of Business Processes

The ABC analysis segments tasks and resources by criticality and frequency of use. Category A activities (20% of tasks) generate 80% of the value, category B about 15%, and category C the remainder.

This classification allows improvements to be targeted where they have the most impact, whether through process revisions or partial automation. Gains are measurable and quickly realized.

Each analysis cycle reassesses priorities and updates trade-offs based on new objectives or regulatory constraints.

Identifying and Eliminating Redundant Tasks

Legacy processes—often inherited from larger organizations or mergers—include duplicates and multiple approval steps.

Reducing friction points smooths the flow of information between departments and improves traceability. Fewer steps also mean fewer human errors and lower quality control costs.

This approach supports simplified governance and strengthens team accountability.

Stock and Procurement Optimization

In inventory management, the 80/20 analysis reveals that 20% of SKU references account for 80% of financial value. ABC classification helps adjust safety stock levels and replenishment frequencies accordingly.

A logistics company used this method to revamp its spare parts inventory. By revising its category A management, it cut tied-up capital by 25% and reduced stockouts by 40%. This example shows how the 80/20 rule, combined with ABC analysis, transforms inventory decisions.

Optimized stock turnover improves cash flow and lowers warehousing costs.

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Designing Efficient Digital Processes: Automation and Integration

Workflows automated around Pareto concentrate development on high-value scenarios. CRM and ERP integrations ensure data consistency and speed up decision-making.

Automating Critical Workflows

By identifying the 20% of tasks that consume the most time, targeted automations are designed (scripts, robotic process automation, microservices). These automations reduce lead times and minimize error risks.

The company gains agility and frees teams for higher-value activities such as strategic analysis or product innovation.

Benefits accumulate rapidly from the initial deployments, justifying the upfront investment.

Integrating CRM and ERP Systems

A coherent data flow between CRM, ERP and analytics tools provides a unified view of customer interactions and operational performance. The 80/20 rule guides integration configuration: only essential fields and processes are synchronized in real time.

This prevents information overload and simplifies system maintenance. Data-entry and reconciliation errors vanish, and key indicators are always up to date.

Management can thus oversee sales, production and cash flow from a consolidated, streamlined dashboard.

Real-Time Management with Analytics

Data analytics drawn from digital processes identify bottlenecks, analyze cycle times and measure operation profitability. By focusing dashboards on the 20% of KPIs that are most revealing, information overload is avoided.

Alerts and thresholds are configured to flag critical deviations, enabling immediate adjustments. Teams are continuously informed and respond faster to demand fluctuations or incidents.

A service company implemented a dashboard centered on five KPIs from its CRM and ERP. It achieved a 35% reduction in order processing times, demonstrating the value of digital management focused on strategic indicators.

Amplifying the 80/20 Effect with Custom Software

Customer and project data reveal high-leverage growth areas. A modular, contextual system amplifies this impact by eliminating low-value tasks.

Leveraging Customer Data and Identifying Bottlenecks

Ticket, user journey and complaint analyses highlight major friction points. Correlating these data with transaction volumes pinpoints the top features to digitize or optimize.

This mapping structures the roadmap for custom development and anticipates future needs.

Efforts then concentrate on the 20% of features that generate 80% of customer satisfaction and drastically reduce support calls.

Mapping Project and Digital Initiative Profitability

By combining development costs, deployment timelines and estimated gains, project-by-project profitability is assessed. The 80/20 principle drives the selection of initiatives with the best return on investment.

Less profitable initiatives are paused or outsourced, while strategic ones receive additional resources.

This financial discipline ensures a balanced, business-aligned project portfolio.

Designing Modular and Scalable Systems

Custom software built in independent modules supports future evolution. Each component focuses on a key functionality (quote management, project tracking, invoicing) identified via Pareto.

This hybrid approach combines proven open-source building blocks with in-house development, avoiding vendor lock-in. It meets scalability and security requirements while controlling maintenance costs.

A financial group built its document management platform on microservices, concentrating initial development on the 20% of document flows representing 80% of the volume. This modular design cut time-to-market by six months and simplified the addition of new regulatory features.

Turning Time Management into a Competitive Advantage

The Pareto law is more than a mantra: it structures governance, eliminates waste and directs digital investments to the most rewarding areas. By targeting the 20% of activities that generate most of the value, companies reduce complexity, accelerate execution and strengthen agility.

Implementing automated processes, consolidating data and designing modular solutions amplify this 80/20 effect, ensuring a rapid and sustainable return on investment.

Depending on your business challenges and context, our experts can guide you in deploying a tailored 80/20 strategy: priority audit, key workflow definition and custom system development.

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7 Key Factors for a Successful ERP Project: Alignment, Data, Change Management

7 Key Factors for a Successful ERP Project: Alignment, Data, Change Management

Auteur n°3 – Benjamin

The implementation of an ERP is far more than just a software choice: it embodies a deep transformation of processes, roles and corporate culture. For Swiss SMEs and mid-sized enterprises, the key lies in clear objectives, executive commitment, team buy-in and data mastery.

Beyond functional scope, project governance, mobilization of business experts and change management determine ROI and system sustainability. This article unveils seven essential factors to succeed in any ERP project—regardless of vendor or technology—by adopting a contextual, scalable and independent approach.

Strategic Alignment and Governance

An ERP project’s success starts with clear business objectives and unwavering executive sponsorship. Governance must translate strategic vision into concrete decisions and prioritize initiatives according to their business impact.

Define Measurable Business Objectives

Before any technical consideration, it is essential to formalize expected outcomes in terms of operational performance, lead-time reduction or financial gains. Each metric must be quantified and dated to monitor project progress.

Formalizing these objectives serves as a guide throughout the project and simplifies stakeholder communication, ensuring every enhancement is justified by a business benefit.

Secure Active Executive Support

Involving an executive sponsor who champions the transformation at the leadership level is decisive for removing organizational roadblocks and making priority calls when tensions arise.

This sponsor bridges the ERP project and overall strategy, continuously communicating its importance to both IT teams and business units. Their backing keeps momentum, secures necessary resources and validates trade-offs.

Without this support, objectives may become diluted among conflicting priorities, risking delays, cost overruns and missed deadlines.

Establish a Representative Steering Committee

Technical and functional governance takes shape through an interdisciplinary body that brings together IT leadership, business managers, finance and operations. This committee sets milestones, approves deliverables and ensures adherence to the schedule.

Functioning as the decision hub, it locks down requirements, oversees the budget and drives change management, providing a 360° view of the project.

User Engagement and Business Expertise

Engaging key users from day one ensures ownership of the new system and early identification of real needs. Involving business experts guarantees faithful process translation and higher adoption rates.

Involve Key Users in the Scoping Phase

Business liaisons who understand operational nuances participate in workshops to define use cases. They validate workflows and anticipate required adaptations.

Their presence fosters gradual uptake: they become internal ambassadors, training peers and mitigating resistance. This participatory approach reduces rework and secures functional milestones.

Absent this involvement, scope often remains limited to declarative needs, disconnected from daily operations, creating gaps between the tool and real-world practice.

Select the Right Business Experts

Beyond end users, it is critical to engage internal or external experts who grasp both business processes and ERP stakes. They ease understanding of standard functionalities and guide necessary extensions.

A pharmaceutical distributor appointed its quality manager as lead business expert, anticipating regulatory constraints and clearly defining traceability rules. This decision avoided unnecessary developments and sped up final approval of the compliance module.

The right business profiles reduce back-and-forth, ensure process-management coherence and prevent miscommunications between IT and operations.

Train and Empower Gradually

Training shouldn’t be a one-off event at project end, but a continuous journey. Role-based sessions combined with hands-on workshops accelerate skill development.

By empowering “super-users,” your organization gains ambassadors who can handle daily questions and swiftly escalate anomalies or improvement suggestions.

This approach lessens central support load and fosters an internal dynamic where everyone contributes to project success.

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Data Mastery and Quality

Clean, well-documented data are the foundation of a reliable ERP implementation: they properly feed modules and ensure report accuracy. Without rigorous cleansing and governance, the project risks stumbling over inconsistencies and duplicates.

Audit and Prepare Existing Data

The first step is a comprehensive inventory of data: item references, supplier records, customer accounts, inventory levels and pricing. This audit identifies duplicates, gaps and heterogeneous formats.

Although laborious, initial cleansing ensures a smooth go-live and minimizes fixes during UAT.

Implement Data Governance

Beyond cleansing, a data governance framework must define roles, responsibilities and update processes. Each critical data element is assigned an owner who ensures its quality and consistency.

Without governance, interfaces with third-party systems quickly generate inconsistencies, undermining report reliability and automated processes.

This structure prevents re-duplication and enforces strict rules for future enrichment, guaranteeing the ERP remains the single source of truth.

Use Automated Migration and Validation Tools

Migration scripts and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools automate data transfer, transformation and validation. They ensure operational traceability and trigger alerts on anomalies.

These tools limit manual intervention, accelerate migration and improve the reliability of the ERP’s initial data set.

Tailored Methodology and Scalable Technology

Choosing a bespoke project methodology and a modular ERP architecture ensures agility and future-proofing. SMEs and mid-sized enterprises should avoid one-size-fits-all approaches and favor open technologies without vendor lock-in.

Adapt the Project Method to the SME Context

Whether Scrum, V-model or a hybrid approach, the framework must suit team size, process complexity and corporate culture. An overly heavy methodology can hinder buy-in, while one that’s too light may miss critical errors.

By selecting the right level of formality and oversight, you combine the responsiveness required by the business with the discipline needed to manage risks.

Choose a Modular, Open-Source Solution

Open-source ERP solutions deliver independence from vendors, strong community support and controlled licensing costs. Their modular architecture lets you deploy core components first, then add advanced features progressively.

Plan for Scalability and Continuous Integration

From day one, define a version-upgrade strategy, automated testing and a CI/CD deployment pipeline. This safeguards ERP and connected module updates without major operational disruptions.

A construction materials company implemented a test pipeline that validates every change on a production clone. As a result, biannual updates deploy overnight with no user impact.

This approach keeps the ERP performant and aligned with business needs over time, while reducing version-upgrade costs and risks.

Ensure the Success of Your ERP Project

Key success factors for an ERP project rest on strong strategic alignment, user and business-expert engagement, rigorous data quality practices and a contextual methodology. Choosing an open-source, modular and scalable solution—while planning for continuous integration—secures ROI and minimizes drift risk.

Regardless of your industry or organization size, our experts are ready to help you define your objectives, support process transformation and deploy a tailored, sustainable ERP solution integrated into your digital ecosystem.

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From Basic Outsourcing to Smart Sourcing: Building a More Agile, Modular, and Lock-In-Free IT Model

From Basic Outsourcing to Smart Sourcing: Building a More Agile, Modular, and Lock-In-Free IT Model

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

In an era of accelerated digital transformation, traditional outsourcing models are reaching their limits in the face of increasingly complex architectures and the speed demanded by the market. To maintain agility and control, companies are turning to smart sourcing, which combines modularity, specialization, and multi-vendor approaches without lock-in.

This paradigm shift relies on open architectures, granular governance, and seamless orchestration of external expertise. It’s no longer about handing over the entire IT function at once, but about assembling an evolving technical ecosystem where each component can be adjusted, replaced, or brought back in-house without disruption. Discover how to move from massive delegation to intelligent sourcing.

Why Traditional Outsourcing Is Reaching Its Limits

Monolithic contracts with a single provider create technical and strategic rigidity. Proprietary tools and processes increase dependency risks and stifle innovation.

Progressive Lock-In Mechanisms

In the historical outsourcing model, all IT activities—from application maintenance to hosting—are entrusted to a single provider. Over time, proprietary interfaces and custom workflows multiply without clear standardization guidelines. This accumulation builds a dependency debt that complicates any transition.

Every significant evolution becomes a lengthy, costly project requiring dedicated expertise to understand and adapt opaque technical areas. Internal teams eventually lose mastery of the codebase and core architecture, undermining responsiveness to business requests.

Contractually, a pricing structure based on time & materials (T & M) or fixed-price contract can obscure cost overruns and limit visibility into actual work performed. Contract renewals reinforce this dependency and raise a critical question: who truly benefits from innovation?

Impact on Consistency and Security

The single-vendor approach heightens security risks: lack of technical redundancy and reuse of proprietary modules expose the entire system to the same vulnerability. In the event of a major incident, implementing recovery plans is challenging because critical processes often rely on single pillars.

Moreover, the absence of vendor diversity limits the opportunity to test alternative, innovative solutions. Organizations find themselves trapped in a cycle where every partial migration incurs additional costs and operational disruptions.

This lack of strategic flexibility directly affects the ability to leverage new technologies—whether adopting a sovereign cloud, testing an open-source framework, or integrating a specialized AI service. Potential gains remain captive to the historical provider.

Case Study: A Swiss Industrial SME

A 150-employee Swiss industrial SME outsourced its entire business system to a single provider, hosting applications and servers on a proprietary platform. Each update required a week of planned downtime and incurred unexpected costs to adapt the service to regulatory changes.

After three years, this dependency led to a 30 % budget overrun and triple the deployment times, penalizing the time-to-market. This example shows that lacking sourcing modularity can turn apparent cost savings into a structural growth bottleneck.

The SME then initiated a smart sourcing approach to break its IT into independent modules, reduce downtime windows, and diversify vendors according to their domain expertise.

The Foundations of Smart Sourcing: Open Architectures and Multi-Vendor

Smart sourcing relies on API-first architectures and open standards to ensure interoperability. It favors a multi-vendor ecosystem where each component can evolve or be replaced without disruption.

API-First and Cloud Independence

Adopting an API-first approach means that every service, whether developed in-house or by a third party, exposes its functionality via standardized interfaces. This facilitates integration of new modules, whether they are specific business functions or third-party monitoring and security services.

Using containers and infrastructure as code decouples the application architecture from its execution environment. Workloads can shift between public, private, or sovereign clouds without major redesign, preserving freedom of choice against the major cloud providers.

This expected flexibility is further reinforced when accompanied by standards like OpenAPI or GraphQL, which document and ensure compatibility across successive service versions. This technical traceability limits regression risks and supports continuous improvement.

Multi-Vendor Strategy and Specialization

In the smart sourcing model, governance clearly identifies which skill blocks to outsource: application maintenance, DevOps, automated testing, cloud platform management, or AI module development. Each provider contributes according to its core expertise, ensuring a high level of proficiency.

Centralized contract management is based on a shared repository of technical and business KPIs. Internal teams retain control of the strategic roadmap, while a dedicated vendor management function ensures coherence and alignment among partners.

By distributing responsibilities, it becomes possible to negotiate SLAs tailored to each service and review them periodically based on performance and evolving business objectives. This contractual flexibility fosters innovation and internal skill development.

Case Study: A Swiss Public Agency

A public agency coordinating critical infrastructure fragmented its information system into five functional domains, each assigned to a specialized provider. The entire setup rests on a centralized API mesh and an open-source data bus, ensuring security and resilience.

This modularization reduced deployment times for new external services by 40 % while limiting vendor lock-in. The example demonstrates that combining API-first with a multi-vendor approach paves the way for agile governance, where each component can evolve or be replaced without global impact.

Internal teams retain responsibility for strategic architecture and security decisions, ensuring the functional and technical sovereignty of the state.

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Governance as a Key Success Factor

Demanding provider management ensures coherence and quality of deliverables. Centralized coordination avoids isolation and silos among vendors.

Steering and Coordination Mechanisms

To orchestrate multiple partners, it’s essential to define a clear, shared master plan, including a service catalog, roles and responsibilities, and escalation processes in case of issues. A monthly steering committee brings together the CIO, business managers, and provider representatives.

Technical KPIs are consolidated in a dashboard accessible to all, ensuring transparency and rapid reaction in case of deviation.

Open Standards and Interoperability

Adopting open standards reduces integration effort between services and minimizes exit barriers from a provider. Contracts specify the use of interoperable data formats (JSON, Protobuf) and secure protocols (OAuth2, TLS).

This technical discipline enables deployment of complementary solutions—whether for reporting, monitoring, or security—without refactoring the application layer. It also enhances the ability to quickly integrate external innovations, whether from SaaS vendors or open-source communities.

By enforcing backward and forward API compatibility, you ensure that an update in one component doesn’t cause a break in another, thus guaranteeing true freedom of choice throughout the service lifecycle.

Case Study: A Major Financial Services Group

A leading financial services firm set up a multi-vendor control center to coordinate five providers covering areas from identity management to cloud infrastructure. Interfaces are standardized via OpenAPI and deployments orchestrated by GitOps.

This structure reduced integration times for new services by 50 % and maintained 99.9 % availability. The example shows that rigorous governance and open standards are decisive levers for successful smart sourcing.

The group thus preserves sovereignty over sensitive data and adjusts its partnerships as the sector evolves.

Toward a Composable and Evolving IT

Composable IT delivers fine-grained modularity where each component can scale or be replaced without global impact. Cloud-agnostic architectures and infrastructure as code ensure optimal resilience and scalability.

Principles of Composability and Scalability

In a composable approach, functionalities are broken down into autonomous services interconnected by APIs. This granularity allows each component to evolve independently, whether it’s a payment module, a recommendation engine, or a BI tool.

Scalability becomes a granular exercise: each service scales according to its specific needs, optimizing resource usage. Serverless or container-based architectures facilitate this dynamic resizing.

This fine-grained modularity reduces tunnel effects during scaling or updates, as the impact remains confined to a defined scope. It also enables shorter delivery cycles, supporting continuous innovation.

Infrastructure as Code and Cloud-Agnostic Design

Infrastructure as code lets you manage the entire environment—network, servers, databases—via versioned configuration files. Deployments become reproducible, auditable, and quick to rebuild in case of an incident.

By defining cloud-agnostic modules, you can switch from one provider to another without major code redesign. This portability ensures ongoing negotiation leverage with cloud players and preserves the company’s technological sovereignty.

Paired with CI/CD pipelines and automated integration tests, this approach accelerates deliveries while maintaining overall coherence. It contributes to genuine operational resilience, essential in a VUCA environment.

Case Study: A Swiss Fintech Scale-Up

A Swiss fintech scale-up opted for a composable architecture by decoupling its calculation engine, front end, and data aggregation API. The infrastructure is managed in Terraform, with identical modules for AWS and a local sovereign cloud.

This setup allowed simultaneous testing of two production environments for distinct customer segments, without service interruption. The example demonstrates that infrastructure as code and cloud-agnostic design provide strategic flexibility, zero lock-in, and accelerated time-to-market.

The start-up retains full control of its architecture while leveraging rapid innovation from cloud providers.

Adopt an Agile, Modular, and Lock-In-Free IT Model

Moving from basic outsourcing to smart sourcing transforms IT into a flexible ecosystem based on open architectures, multi-vendor governance, and a composable approach. Each technical block becomes a source of value—interchangeable and scalable—preserving strategic control and minimizing dependency risks. Winning organizations are those that orchestrate their partners around open standards, infrastructure as code orchestration, and centralized management.

If you’re considering fragmenting your sourcing to gain agility, secure your technology choices, or future-proof your architecture, our experts are here to guide you through this strategic transition.

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.

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

What Does a CIO Advisory Actually Do – and How a More Modern Approach Can Better Serve Companies

What Does a CIO Advisory Actually Do – and How a More Modern Approach Can Better Serve Companies

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

In an environment where infrastructure complexity, the cloud and business challenges directly determine competitiveness, a CIO Advisory service positions itself as a facilitator for strategic decisions. It’s no longer just about providing ad-hoc support to the CIO, but about structuring the digital vision around the company’s operational and financial priorities. Through a pragmatic, open and modular approach, this function evolves to set a clear direction, modernize the architecture, strengthen governance and maximize business impact at every stage.

Defining and Steering the IT Strategy

An IT roadmap only makes sense when it is derived from business objectives. This approach ensures a coherent allocation of resources, focused on growth, performance and security.

In-depth IT Situation Analysis

The starting point is to perform a comprehensive inventory of existing systems, processes and associated costs. This phase leverages technical audits, interviews with business stakeholders and performance indicators. It identifies friction points, critical dependencies and security risks.

Beyond simple inventories, the approach includes data-flow modeling and security-risk analysis. The goal is to prioritize initiatives based on their direct impact on operational efficiency, regulatory compliance and budget control. This prioritization is essential to propose a realistic, scalable action plan.

Thanks to this rigorous mapping, teams gain a consolidated view of their IT strengths and weaknesses. They can then decide whether to pursue modernization projects, acquire new solutions or rationalize existing licenses—aligning each choice with core business needs.

Defining the Target Architecture

The design of the target architecture is based on principles of openness, modularity and built-in security. It favors microservices, an API-first approach and cloud hybridization to avoid vendor lock-in.

Each component is conceived as an interchangeable building block, enabling incremental evolution and solution reversibility. This flexibility simplifies scaling, maintenance and the integration of new services, while limiting hidden costs associated with future migrations.

One illustrative example: a Swiss SME in industrial services consolidated its IT landscape by defining a modular architecture, moving from a monolithic ERP to microservices for order management, inventory and billing. This approach reduced deployment times by 40% and lowered maintenance costs by 25% through domain isolation.

Setting Business-Tech KPIs

To drive roadmap execution, it’s essential to establish clear objectives and indicators (OKRs or KPIs). These metrics cover service availability, team responsiveness, cost savings and the achievement of business milestones.

Dashboards combine IT and financial data to measure the real impact of each initiative. They promote transparency among the CIO, business units and executive management, ensuring agile, accountable governance.

Throughout sprints or project phases, these indicators are regularly reassessed to adjust priorities and maximize return on investment. This iterative loop maintains constant alignment between the IT trajectory and the company’s ambitions.

Cloud Strategy

The goal is not simply “to move to the cloud” but to make the infrastructure more agile, resilient and optimized. An independent vision guides the choice between hybrid, multi-cloud, sovereign cloud or on-premises solutions based on business and regulatory requirements.

Hybrid and Multi-Cloud to Avoid Lock-In

A modern cloud strategy promotes the coexistence of multiple environments: on-premises data centers, public clouds and sovereign clouds. This stance guarantees application resilience and migration freedom.

Hybrid architectures allow critical workloads to run on-premises while leveraging public-cloud scalability for activity peaks. Multi-cloud, meanwhile, spreads risk and cost, avoiding single-vendor dependency and exploiting the best offerings from each provider.

This approach requires centralized governance to orchestrate deployments, security and billing. Automating CI/CD pipelines and using cross-cloud management solutions are therefore essential to preserve agility and consistency.

Cost Optimization and FinOps

Cloud costs are often underestimated at design time. Implementing a FinOps practice helps continuously monitor and control spending: budget allocation by team, invoice tracking and idle-resource management.

With automated reports, decision-makers gain visibility into the most costly items and can choose between architectures (IaaS, PaaS, serverless). They quickly identify under-utilized instances or misfit services and adjust configurations in real time.

This proactive cost management frees up margins to fund high-impact new projects while ensuring total cost of ownership (TCO) control over the entire infrastructure lifecycle.

Sovereign Cloud and Compliance

For sensitive sectors (finance, healthcare, government), a sovereign or local cloud addresses data-localization and certification requirements. This option naturally integrates into a hybrid strategy without sacrificing modularity or performance.

Sovereign platforms guarantee full control over encryption-key management, access traceability and data-center resilience. They also simplify audits and compliance reporting (GDPR, FinSA, ISO 27001).

By selecting sovereign cloud on demand, organizations retain control over their migration strategy: critical workloads are prioritized while less sensitive needs leverage the dynamism and competitiveness of public offerings.

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Enterprise Architecture Management

Enterprise Architecture Management must be flexible, dynamic and aligned with business priorities. It is based on principles of modularity, decoupling and continuous evolution.

Modular Architectures and API-First

The master plan encourages segmenting systems into microservices or functional domains structured according to Domain-Driven Design (DDD). Each service communicates via standardized APIs, ensuring interoperability and deployment independence.

This granularity eases the adoption of new technologies within a limited scope, without disrupting the entire ecosystem. It also enhances resilience: failures remain contained, without halting the full value chain.

An API-first approach also guarantees component reversibility and minimizes vendor lock-in risk. If a provider or solution changes, only integration points need adaptation—not the entire architecture.

Pragmatic Legacy Overhaul

Rather than dismantling a monolith in a single wave, an incremental approach segments the migration by priority domains: authentication, billing, CRM, etc. Each legacy component is isolated and re-engineered as a microservice or cloud-native application.

This phased approach reduces service-outage risks and spreads costs over time. It also quickly reveals quick wins, such as replacing an old module with a proven, lower-cost open-source solution.

Teams continue to operate the legacy system during migration, ensuring business continuity and building expertise on integrated new technologies.

Business-Aligned Roadmaps

Each architectural component is tied to a business process and performance indicator. Technical roadmaps are thus calibrated according to their impact on customer satisfaction, time-to-market and ROI.

Periodic reviews involve IT and business stakeholders to fine-tune the trajectory: prioritizing initiatives, allocating budgets and reallocating resources. This mixed governance ensures maximum responsiveness to market changes.

Moving beyond a single-project mindset to embrace a continuous improvement cycle transforms EAM into a real innovation lever, rather than a mere documentation exercise.

Organization & Governance

IT transformation succeeds when it places people and organization at the heart of strategy. Clearly defined roles and lightweight yet robust governance foster agility and value creation.

Product-Centric Roles and Cross-Functional Collaboration

Introducing Product Owners, Tech Leads and dedicated architects ensures precise stewardship of initiatives. Each team owns its functional and technical scope, simplifying prioritization and coordination.

The divide between IT and business vanishes through agile ceremonies (backlog reviews, demos, retrospectives) involving all stakeholders. Decisions are made based on delivered value rather than purely technical criteria.

This organization enhances transparency, reduces back-and-forth and accelerates time-to-market, while fostering a culture of continuous improvement within teams.

Skills Development and Internal Communities

Creating communities of practice (Cloud, DevOps, SecOps, Data) encourages expertise sharing and the dissemination of best practices. Targeted training and peer mentoring strengthen team autonomy.

This setup reduces reliance on external providers for routine tasks and prepares the company for future technology shifts. It also boosts employee satisfaction, as individuals feel invested in the project’s success.

The goal is to embed technical progress over time, growing internal talent pools and reducing turnover driven by skill obsolescence.

Lightweight Governance and Value-Driven Steering

Rather than a bureaucratic structure, IT-Light governance relies on small committees and streamlined processes. Steering committees meet on key topics (risks, budgets, deployments) and use shared indicators.

Strategic decisions favor quick wins and high-impact levers before long-term initiatives. Each project undergoes a clear cost-benefit analysis, ensuring choices align with company priorities.

This pragmatic approach balances rigor and flexibility, while ensuring decision traceability for audits and compliance reviews.

Position Your IT as a Strategic Lever

A modern CIO Advisory sheds light on every IT decision through the lens of business challenges, favors open and modular architectures, and establishes agile, value-centric governance. By adopting an independent cloud strategy, flexible architecture management and a product-oriented organization, companies gain agility, performance and risk control.

The benefits are both operational and financial: cost reduction, faster innovation and enhanced resilience. This holistic vision transforms IT into a genuine driver of competitiveness.

Our experts are by your side to define the most suitable roadmap for your priorities and support you at every step of your digital transformation.

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.

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

Converting a WordPress Site into a Mobile App: An Underestimated but Powerful Strategy

Converting a WordPress Site into a Mobile App: An Underestimated but Powerful Strategy

Auteur n°4 – Mariami

In a context where mobile ubiquity is redefining user and team expectations, converting a WordPress site into a hybrid application becomes an underestimated strategic lever. Rather than embarking on a lengthy and costly native mobile development, this approach leverages existing content, APIs, and workflows to rapidly deliver a seamless experience.

By relying on an Ionic/Angular stack, companies can prototype or modernize a mobile channel while retaining their primary CMS. This method combines quick implementation, cost control, and scalability, and naturally fits into an omnichannel digital roadmap before considering a potential move to native development or a multi-tenant architecture.

Reuse Your WordPress Platform for a High-Performance Mobile Channel

Leveraging WordPress content and APIs allows you to deliver a coherent mobile application without starting from scratch. This reuse ensures message consistency and shortens the project timeline.

Utilizing Existing Content and APIs

Most WordPress sites are built on architectures using REST or GraphQL routes that already expose posts, pages, and business data. Ionic hybrid apps consume these services like a standard web front end, avoiding content and format duplication.

Implementing an API proxy or a lightweight orchestration layer secures calls and centralizes authentication logic. This way, the same endpoints serve both the mobile app and the website, ensuring flow consistency.

By building on existing resources, teams save time on data schema design and admin portal setup, since WordPress remains the single back office for content management.

Maintaining UX/UI Consistency between Site and App

The mobile user experience (UX) must reflect the website’s visual identity and navigation. Sharing UI components between the PWA and the Ionic app ensures graphical and behavioral consistency.

Hybrid frameworks allow style customization via CSS or SCSS, and adaptive themes handle interaction differences (touch versus click). The initial design system can thus be extended without rewriting all templates.

This uniformity strengthens brand image and reduces the user’s learning curve, as they instantly recognize the interface whether they access it via a mobile browser or the installed app.

Reusing Business Workflows

Content approval processes, form handling, and transactional flows already implemented in WordPress can be exposed through the API and integrated into the app. There’s no need to recreate these logics on the mobile side.

A business insurance company transformed its subscription portal into a mobile app by reusing the existing dynamic forms and validation rules. This project demonstrated that the pricing calculation logic, fully managed by WordPress, could be consumed by Ionic without any loss of accuracy or auditability.

This case illustrates the ability to preserve core workflows, limit end-to-end testing, and significantly reduce development effort while retaining the robustness of proven business rules.

Scalability and Progressive Enhancement with Ionic/Angular

The Ionic/Angular combination provides a solid foundation for gradually adding mobile features without overloading the initial project. This modularity simplifies the introduction of push notifications, analytics, and offline capabilities.

Modular and Scalable Architecture

Angular brings a clear project structure with isolated modules, services, and components, while Ionic offers ready-to-use UI building blocks optimized for mobile. This symbiosis ensures controlled scaling.

Splitting the app into thematic modules (authentication, catalog, user profile) enables rapid deployment of reduced versions for testing or MVPs before adding new modules.

With this approach, teams can prioritize development and release incremental updates without disrupting the entire codebase or compromising service stability.

Customization, Analytics, and Push Notifications

Ionic and Angular plugins natively support integration with push notification services (Firebase, OneSignal) and analytics solutions (Google Analytics, Matomo). These features connect to the WordPress back end via the API or middleware.

Adding personalization—such as content suggestions or recommendations based on user behavior—can be managed through rules hosted in WordPress or an external service without overhauling the app.

These features boost engagement and allow marketing and product teams to adjust campaigns or user journeys in real time, using the same data sources as the website.

Offline Capabilities and Synchronization

Ionic’s local storage options (Storage, SQLite) let the app retain key content and form data offline. Synchronization occurs automatically once a connection is restored.

A logistics organization deployed a hybrid app for its field technicians. Intervention forms were preloaded overnight, and reports synced as soon as the network became available. This solution ensured sensitive data remained accessible even in coverage gaps while preserving workflow integrity.

This approach increases the app’s resilience and enables offline use cases without complicating architecture or creating dedicated services.

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Omnichannel Strategy and Headless Migration

The hybrid app serves as the first component of an omnichannel strategy, offering a testable and measurable mobile channel. It also facilitates a gradual migration to a headless or multi-tenant model.

Positioning within the Omnichannel Ecosystem

Mobile is just one touchpoint: the Ionic app connects to the same data streams as the website, AI chatbot, or in-store kiosks, ensuring uniform user journeys.

Aggregating metrics from these channels optimizes content distribution and personalizes the experience by channel and user profile.

Incremental Implementation of a Headless CMS

Headless CMS transition can start by keeping WordPress as the editorial source of truth and exposing its content via the REST API. Mobile, tablet, and web apps consume the same endpoints.

Over time, the team can introduce a dedicated service for certain dynamic content without impacting the existing app, then progressively redirect routes to the new headless system.

This incremental strategy minimizes risks, avoids massive migrations, and provides flexibility to experiment with specialized solutions (e.g., a PIM or DAM) without blocking the mobile project.

Preparing for Multi-Tenancy and Future Channels

The modular structure of the Ionic app and the front/back separation simplify multi-tenant architecture, where each entity uses the same codebase with specific configurations.

A public service transformed its local information portal into a multi-brand application by simply adjusting endpoints and CSS themes per municipality. This project demonstrates the ability to deploy multiple app variants from a single platform.

This flexibility prepares for future integration of emerging channels (connected watches, desktop PWAs, interactive kiosks) without starting from scratch.

Minimizing Time-to-Market, Costs, and Preparing for Native Development

The hybrid approach reduces time-to-market and experimental costs compared to a full native project. It provides a testing ground to refine the roadmap before committing to native or multi-tenant development.

Accelerating Launch and User Testing

Hybrid development can deliver an operational first version in weeks, versus months for separate iOS and Android native apps. User feedback arrives earlier.

Product teams can validate usage hypotheses and prioritize enhancements without immediately engaging more expensive native resources.

This rapid feedback loop improves quality, reduces risk, and aligns the roadmap with actual needs rather than upfront assumptions.

Controlling Project Costs and Risks

Using a single codebase for multiple platforms compresses development and maintenance costs while limiting the need for platform-specific expertise.

Budgets are focused on feature additions and experience optimization rather than managing two parallel projects.

Reducing the number of technology components decreases testing scope, lowers infrastructure expenses, and minimizes technical debt from multiple native environments.

Preparing for a Future Native or Multi-Tenant PWA

The Ionic/Angular architecture can evolve toward partial native solutions (device capabilities) via Capacitor or toward a PWA enriched with progressive features.

For example, a services company piloted its mobile subscription model with the hybrid app before investing in native development for payment handling and biometric sensors. This pilot validated the channel’s relevance and reduced risk prior to heavy investment.

This incremental path ensures continuous alignment between business needs and technology choices while guaranteeing extensibility to multi-tenant architectures in the long run.

Speed Up Your Mobile Channel by Leveraging Your Existing CMS

Converting your WordPress site into a hybrid mobile app allows you to test a robust mobile channel, modernize an aging platform, and rapidly prototype new services. By reusing existing content, workflows, and APIs and relying on the Ionic/Angular stack, you minimize time-to-market, control costs, and prepare for future native, headless, or multi-tenant evolution.

The Edana experts support you from strategic planning to production deployment, adopting a contextual, open-source, and modular approach to ensure long-term performance, security, and scalability.

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.

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

Digitizing the HR Function: How Integrated Systems Modernize Payroll, Compliance, and Employee Experience

Digitizing the HR Function: How Integrated Systems Modernize Payroll, Compliance, and Employee Experience

Auteur n°3 – Benjamin

The growing complexity of Swiss payroll—Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI), Disability Insurance (DI), Loss of Earnings Compensation (APG), withholding tax, multi-site regulation—combined with high employee expectations and international mobility makes the HR function particularly demanding. To address these challenges, organizations must move beyond isolated tools and manual spreadsheets and invest in an integrated HR platform.

Whether it’s an HR ERP, a tailored HRIS, or an API-first interconnected ecosystem, the goal remains the same: ensure compliance, automate processes, and deliver a seamless employee experience. By centralizing data and workflows, a unified digital architecture frees HR teams from administrative tasks so they can focus on human and strategic dimensions.

Consolidating Payroll and HR Compliance

A unified HR platform brings payroll, social contributions, and withholding tax into a single database. It simplifies adherence to OASI/DI/APG obligations and drastically reduces the risk of manual errors. This level of consolidation enables Swiss organizations to gain agility and traceability, even across multiple sites and expatriate assignments.

Simplified Salary Management

The integrated payroll module eliminates re-entries and ensures consistency of paid amounts. Calculations are automated for fixed salaries, bonuses, or telework allowances.

Any contractual change (new assignment, change in rate of employment) automatically reflects in payroll calculations without manual intervention. Results appear in real time in the system.

With locally configurable rules, the solution adapts to cantonal specifics and withholding tax. Payslips are generated uniformly, regardless of the organization’s site.

Enhanced Regulatory Compliance

Social contributions submissions become a seamless process thanks to direct integration with OASI funds and tax authorities. Declaration files are prepared and transmitted automatically in the required formats.

Continuous monitoring of thresholds and deadlines alerts in advance about missing declarations or amounts to regularize. Transmission errors are thus nearly eliminated.

Regulatory updates—OASI rates, withholding tax scales, APG ceilings—deploy to the platform without delay. The company maintains full compliance at all times, sparing HR teams from tedious monitoring.

Multi-site Agility and Expatriate Management

The platform simultaneously handles multiple legal entities and sites in Switzerland and abroad. Country-specific payroll rules are encapsulated in dedicated calculation engines within the same database.

Internationally mobile employees benefit from automatic calculations of benefits, allowances, and cross-border social contributions. Payroll and working-time data consolidate into a global report.

Example: a digital services company with several international sites migrated its processes to a modular HRIS. The project cut monthly declaration preparation time by 70% and eliminated redundancies across entities. This initiative demonstrated the effectiveness of a centralized system in managing payroll in a complex environment.

Streamlining the Employee Experience with Portals and Automated Workflows

Self-service portals and digital workflows enhance employee satisfaction and significantly reduce recurring HR inquiries. Each employee has a personalized space for requests and documents. Automated approval processes and notifications ensure speed and transparency for leave requests, expense claims, or role changes.

Personalized Employee Portal

The employee portal serves as the single interface for HR and administrative requests. Accessible on mobile and desktop, it provides a complete history of personal documents (payslips, contracts, certificates).

Employees can update their information (address, bank account, family status) autonomously. Each change triggers an instant system update without manual intervention.

Training and onboarding modules can be integrated to offer new hires a digitalized journey. The employee experience becomes more consistent and modern, strengthening the organization’s attractiveness.

Automated Approval Workflows

Validation processes are defined by configurable rules (by role, amount, or department). At each step, the appropriate approver receives a notification and can approve or reject via the interface or email.

Authorized actions, such as bonus approval or contract modification, are tracked in a complete audit trail. All decisions remain visible and tamper-proof.

Approval timeframes are capped by automated reminders and alerts to prevent bottlenecks. Managers have a dashboard to monitor pending requests.

Mobile Access and Self-Service

Dedicated mobile apps provide constant access to essential HR features: payslip review, leave requests, training-day balance tracking, and expense submission.

Secure login (SSO, strong authentication) ensures data integrity, even on the move. Workflows are optimized for quick use on smartphones or tablets.

Example: a multi-site foundation deployed a mobile portal for its employees. HR ticket volume dropped by 60% in the first quarter, proving that self-service and mobility boost team autonomy and engagement.

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Leveraging HR Analytics and Strategic Reporting

Built-in HR analytics offers real-time visibility on key indicators: turnover, personnel cost, absences, and skills distribution. Custom dashboards enable proactive planning and development optimization. By combining operational and financial data, organizations drive cross-functional decision-making and align HR actions with overall business strategy.

Dashboards and Key Metrics

Dashboards centralize essential metrics: retention rate, salary evolution, absenteeism rate, and training performance. Each indicator updates automatically from transactional data.

Managers can filter by department, site, or job category to quickly identify risk areas. Configurable alerts flag deviations (high turnover, pay gaps).

Graphical data consolidation simplifies reporting to executive teams and finance committees, enhancing transparency and fact-based decision-making.

Proactive Forecasting and Planning

Predictive algorithms estimate the impact of recruitment drives, compensation adjustments, or training programs on the overall budget. Scenario simulations help weigh different strategies.

The “what-if” feature projects payroll costs and skill needs over the short and medium term. Business leaders can prepare succession plans or accelerate internal mobility.

This level of proactive planning transforms HR into a true strategic center, boosting organizational competitiveness and resilience.

Managing Internal Mobility

A single repository of skills and career paths simplifies identifying internal candidates for new roles or special projects. Managers access a mapped overview of available talent and competencies.

Mobility workflows are documented from internal application to new-role onboarding. Approvals coordinate between HR, managers, and finance to ensure budget alignment.

Example: an industrial group implemented advanced HR reporting coupled with an internal mobility module. Within six months, retention rose by 8% and key-position vacancy times dropped by 30%, demonstrating the direct impact of integrated analytics.

Building an API-First, Interoperable HR Architecture

Choosing an API-first architecture enables seamless integration of specialized modules—payroll, time management, HRIS, finance—without vendor lock-in. Each service communicates via standardized APIs, ensuring modularity and scalability. A hybrid approach of open-source components and custom development finely tunes functionality to business needs while preserving system longevity and security.

API-First for System Integration

Designing modules around REST or GraphQL APIs guarantees native interoperability. Time-tracking tools, the payroll platform, and CRM can exchange data streams in real time.

Exposed APIs are documented and versioned to support gradual scale-up. Service updates don’t impact other modules, significantly reducing maintenance costs.

Reusing APIs in third-party portals or mobile apps maintains data consistency and simplifies adding new features without starting from scratch.

Custom Connectors and Modularity

Custom connectors adapt existing solutions (open-source or proprietary) to each organization’s specific context. This approach avoids exclusive reliance on a closed, restrictive suite.

Each component can be replaced or updated independently. For example, the payroll engine can switch to a third-party provider without overhauling the employee portal.

Introducing microservices for critical functions (payroll calculation, absence management) allows scaling each component according to load and business constraints.

Security, Open Source, and Scalability

Preferring proven open-source solutions (frameworks, databases) ensures no vendor lock-in and access to an active community for updates and patches.

A rigorous security policy includes data encryption in transit and at rest, granular access controls, and regular audits to anticipate vulnerabilities.

Finally, a containerized, orchestrated architecture (Docker, Kubernetes) offers optimal adaptability to activity peaks and future changes, while ensuring high service availability.

A Modernized HR System for Performance and Engagement

Digitizing HR with an integrated, modular, API-first platform centralizes Swiss payroll, automates regulatory compliance, and delivers a seamless employee experience. Self-service portals, automated workflows, and strategic analytics transform HR into a proactive hub. A hybrid of open-source components and custom development ensures flexibility, security, and sustainability.

Our experts guide the implementation of unified HR ecosystems, tailored to each context and designed to free teams from administrative tasks. Discuss your challenges with an Edana specialist to turn your HR function into a driver of sustainable competitiveness.

Discuss your challenges with an Edana expert