Digital transformation and architecture modernization have become a top priority for organizations as the shift to omnichannel and digital-first strategies continues to accelerate. Integration plays a key role in this trend, and you’ve probably been bombarded with messaging on the importance of the right integration strategy.
Point-to-point integration, APIs, ESBs, iPaaS – the options can be confusing and differentiating between them can be difficult. The proliferation of “as-a-service” business models means iPaaS at least sounds slightly familiar. But what is an iPaaS anyway?
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
The manufacturing sector has long been a leader in innovation. The industrial revolution over a century ago centered on the adoption of mechanical advances to produce items at speeds and volumes that would have been previously unimaginable.
Henry Ford’s concept of the assembly line in the 1910’s, Toyota’s Kanban methodology introduced in the 1940’s and Kaizen in the 1980’s, and Motorola’s development of Six Sigma in the 1990’s are additional revolutionary principles established by manufacturing, then adopted by many other industries.
In 2023, manufacturing challenges center upon computer integrated manufacturing and data proliferation.
Earlier this year we conducted the Digibee 2023 State of Enterprise Integration survey, collecting insights from more than one thousand CTOs, CIOs, system architects, and web developers across several key industries such as Manufacturing, Finance, and Retail.
Several overarching themes emerged representing the goals and challenges experienced by all industries, where other areas showed more industry-specific nuances. In this blog post we examine the insights garnered specifically from Manufacturing and the trends the report uncovered.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
Integration Objectives in Manufacturing
Not unlike the industrial revolution, modern advances in technology have spurred huge leaps in innovation, forcing manufacturers to adapt or risk losing their competitive advantage. New industry trends include servitization, hyper-automation, and sustainability, with all companies striving to become more data-driven due to rapid adoption of connected devices.
The Digibee State of Enterprise Integration Report findings indicate the adoption of these new trends and related pressures are critical drivers behind enterprise integration within the manufacturing sector:
1. Improve Security, Reliability, and Governance
When survey respondents were asked about goals for integration, Improving Security, Reliability, and Governance ranked 4th across all industries for integration goals, but by contrast it represents the top priority for the manufacturing sector in 2023. The root cause of this concern is the vast array of valuable private data manufacturing systems now handle –everything from the Intellectual Property behind the products being made to the personal information of the employees –requiring many points of access to be secured within Integrated manufacturing solutions.
Businesses are no longer stand-alone operations; they are components of critical infrastructures and supply chains, which significantly increases their exposure to risks.
While security concerns have drastically changed for manufacturing technology in recent years, the pursuit of higher reliability, efficiency, and predictability within manufacturing goes back as far as the industry itself.
Once an item has been manufactured, there is no “undo” button that restores the valuable raw materials used to make it. For this reason, reliability in manufacturing control systems will always be a top concern compared to industries that do not produce physical products. Integration is a priority for reliability as it supports real-time data visibility and monitoring to ensure consistency and accuracy throughout manufacturing execution systems at all stages.
Improvements in governance are built upon insights gained from the integration of different systems within the manufacturing management system. With well-integrated systems, an overview of the internal workings is monitored in real-time to meet standards, and to reduce anomalies or mistakes that jeopardize quality, security, compliance, and safety.
2. Improve/Enhance Business Analytics and Decision-Making
Better governance results in higher quality data, which in turn supports business analytics and decision-making.
With retailers prioritizing improved time to market in the survey, increased pressure will be placed on some manufacturers to produce new products faster.
Retail Demand Forecasting draws upon business analytics to uncover buying patterns to predict future sales. To keep ahead of the curve, a similar integrated infrastructure must be adopted by manufacturers.
Enhanced business analytics help inform demand, supporting supply chain management and just-in-time inventory practices. These are top of mind concerns, with many manufacturers still recovering from the crippling supply-chain issues experienced during the pandemic.
Enterprise integration supports the unification of data from different applications across the operation, streamlining data access and analytics. Manufacturers are leveraging these valuable stores of data to support and help guide the business.
Just as governance requirements rely on business analytics, decision-making is increasingly reliant on automation and AI within integrated manufacturing systems.
Better manufacturing data integration makes it easier to manage and organize higher volumes of information. Unfortunately these large data stores are a barrier for less technologically-sophisticated businesses that rely on legacy systems and manual workflows that 74% of manufacturers must still rely upon.
AI allows manufacturers to extract significant value from the data generated, recognizing patterns within unstructured data and creating models for future outcomes.
The possibilities go well beyond the obvious use-case of predicting future sales and extracting data from manufacturing software systems; innovative companies have employed tools based solely on visual monitoring, such as ŠKODA’s Magic Eye project, to flag and predict undesirable conditions on their EHB3 conveyor.
AI also enables a host of innovative manufacturing capabilities, including automation.
Meet All of Your Integration Goals with Digibee’s iPaaS
Computer integrated manufacturing provides the solid digital foundation needed to adapt to the industry trends and pressures of the modern world. Streamlining data storage and access with Digibee gets the most out of your manufacturing system, whether the challenges you face are at the executive offices or on the factory floor.
Digibee’s intuitive monitoring systems and platform security features allow you to safely connect and integrate with partner and customer systems, for a real-time operation and increased efficiencies.
Posted on June 26, 2023 by Cait Porte - Uncategorized
Interview with expert Brad Steele from Thought Machine providing insights into effective partnership management and creating positive work environments.
There are countless articles on how to build a meaningful customer experience strategy, whether specifically in ecommerce or in any type of selling environment. And while we all strive to continuously, proactively add technologies and process improvements designed to enhance the experience of our customers, sometimes a cautionary tale – learning what not to do – can be particularly insightful.
Everyone has been in the role of consumer, so it’s not a stretch to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What excites you? What entices you to buy? What prompts you to leave a 1-star review or quit on a sale before it’s final?
Regardless of what’s being sold – from souvenir t-shirts to private jets – the desired experience is essentially the same. In this blog, we share a true narrative customer experience gone wrong, and tips on how to avoid this sort of scenario.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
Integration and CX in Ecommerce
Integration underpins successful modern digital ecommerce systems. It allows companies increased freedom to create a seamless omnichannel customer experience through incorporating many specialized tools and platforms.
While integration provides the means for building the best customer experience, looking at the system from the outside, as the customer experiences it, often provides key insights on which areas to focus integration efforts.
How to Improve Customer Experience
The following experience happened several years ago, and the retailer in question has improved their customer experience significantly since. But as far as bad digital customer experiences go, this serves as a cautionary tale, particularly as retailers are increasingly dependent on so many technologies to act as one cohesive unit in delivery of customer experience.
Eliminating Barriers
Suitcase Shopping
Chapter 1:
I wanted to buy a new carry-on suitcase. It had to be the right size for an international flight, and I was hoping for a silver color to match my other luggage.
As luck would have it, I received an email that a large national retailer was having an amazing one-day 70% off sale on luggage. I excitedly clicked through to their website.
Fifteen long seconds later the home page loaded. Annoying since a) that’s really slow and b) I clicked on a CTA for the sale, so why did I land on the home page? I spent some time searching for the luggage sale listing and the page began to load.
And then the server crashed.
This retailer got it right – the right buyer with the right offer at the right time. Success! Then the experience immediately went awry.
As Forbes succinctly points out, convenience is one of the biggest differences between in-store and online shopping. Each negative experience chips away at this primary benefit ecommerce is meant to provide.
Common barriers include:
Slow response times
Unnecessary steps to reach goals
With technology advances such as composable architecture, there are few excuses for anything other than a blazing fast user interface, even at peak times. Don’t make it easier for your customer to support your competitor instead of you. With an estimated 12-24 million ecommerce sites globally, there are plenty of alternatives even for niche businesses!
Set Clear Expectations
Suitcase Shopping
Chapter 2:
Had I been only casually interested in a suitcase, I would have bounced off the site, but I had a specific trip coming up, so I stuck with it. I kept refreshing the page, and eventually it loaded once more.
After a few more crashes I located a silver carry-on in the listing page and clicked through to the details page. ‘SOLD OUT’ it said. I tried a few more silver suitcases with the same result before finally finding one in stock.
It was the right dimensions, but on the details page it was listed as blue, though only pictured in red. At 70% off I opted to settle for this mystery color so I clicked ‘Buy Now’ and got through the purchase process as fast as that suffering server would allow.
Missing, incorrect, or unclear information about the products or services you provide risks:
Appearing professionally incompetent
Eroding customer confidence in your ability as a retailer
Customer assumptions about what something is or does, resulting in disappointment
The color of a suitcase is a minor issue, but these small inconsistencies create uncertainty, impacting the decision to buy. If a business doesn’t know exactly what they are selling, what else don’t they know?
Providing high-quality information empowers the customer to make an informed decision, eliminating confusion or disappointment and the negative reviews and product returns that result. Recent technology advances such as headless commerce can help connect real time inventory with user interfaces, as long as it’s all integrated seamlessly.
Every User is Unique
Suitcase Shopping
Chapter 3:
A few minutes later I started to have some blue/red suitcase buyer’s remorse.
I navigated back to the suitcase listings page and (once again between crashes/slow loading/out of stock items) located a silver suitcase I preferred. I successfully purchased this silver suitcase and then proceeded to cancel my order of the blue/red suitcase.
A few hours later and I still hadn’t received an order cancellation confirmation, so I begrudgingly got on a call with customer service. After about an hour of listening to hold music I was told that everything with my order and cancellation was fine.
THREE DAYS later, the company canceled the silver suitcase order due to an inventory issue. Five days later the “Canceled” blue/red suitcase arrived at my door. Oh, and it was green.
A seamless customer service experience is a hallmark of modern ecommerce. But when you fail in this arena, the negative impact to the customer relationship is significant, indicating:
A lack of concern in meeting your customers’ needs once the sale is complete
No desire to foster an ongoing (and positive) relationship with the people who support your business
Do everything possible to build a robust and enduring customer experience, but remember the CX journey is never over. Every interaction matters, pre-sale, shopping, and post-sale.
If a company exceeds expectations throughout, especially in the conversion of an unhappy customer to a satisfied customer, your shoppers will remain loyal to your brand.
Provide a personalized customer experience where people can chart their own course and access what they need quickly and easily. Draw upon a well-integrated system and advances in AI and automation to support omnichannel customer experiences, and equip your support team with all available system knowledge so they can remediate issues quickly.
How to Support Your Customers with Digibee
We know you work hard to put your customers first, and at Digibee we do the same for you. Our integration platform is reliable, scalable and customizable, giving you the tools needed to build the best experiences for your customers and internal teams.
For more insight on how to keep CX and ecommerce running smoothly in the face of constant change, listen to episode 17 from our Integration Redesigned podcast series, as Bob Howland from Dawn Foods and Cait Porte of Digibee discuss change management and collaboration.
Or episode 16, where Cait and ecommerce executive Chris Muscut discuss the latest trends in retail and how businesses can navigate the ever-changing technological landscape to meet consumer needs.
Let your peak times equal more happy customers (and profits) versus frustration, outages, and unwanted green suitcases.
If you’re interested in how Digibee can help your organization evolve your customer experience, we’d be happy to show you how. Book your choice of a 15-minute discovery call, 30-minute custom demo, or a 60-minute deep dive to learn more.
The Digibee State of Enterprise Integration survey was carried out earlier this year, collecting input and opinions from one thousand CTOs, CIOs, system architects, and web developers in North America.
One very interesting area of insight is the motivation of enterprises that are initiating enterprise integration. Based on answers from Finance respondents, top objectives for integration rank as follows:
Migrate to/upgrade cloud, digital transformation
Improve data security
Enable automation and AI
Let’s dig into the data.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
1. The Cloud & Digital Transformation
According to 32% of the respondents, cloud/digital transformation is the top integration objective for Finance organizations. This makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider the criticality of modernization and innovation within an industry undergoing rapid change.
Finance is a long-established market segment where it’s not uncommon to find legacy, non-cloud native technologies still in use. Rather than advancing the digital strategies critical to the growth of the company, these applications hold it back.
For some organizations, a first step toward the future is often a first step to the cloud. Many Digibee customers in the finance sector implement enterprise integration to support their cloud initiatives, reflecting a growing trend within the industry. In fact, according to a survey by Google Cloud and Harris Poll, 83% of financial services companies are using the public cloud in some form.
With a properly connected environment, Finance companies reap all of the rewards associated with digital transformation, including greater agility, real-time information, and a truly omni-channel and personalized customer experience.
“Today, succeeding in Finance requires a unique combination of creativity and caution. Without a truly connected environment, financial organizations are unable to innovate, curtailing their efforts to digitally transform the business.”
Finance organizations deal with a complicated security landscape, beholden to a range of regulatory bodies concerned with privacy, disclosure, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, and other rules and regulations.
Any company providing financial services, from a loan company to a brokerage firm, must have the proper safeguards in place to protect its customers and the business.
Failure to deliver on this front is catastrophic to the reputation of the company, breaching customer loyalty and trust, and impacting the business for the long term. For context, the financial sector experienced the second highest number of data breaches in 2022, second only to the government.
As a finance organization progresses in its digital transformation, the proliferation of data increases. Cloud-based platforms and infrastructure rely on connected devices, each generating always-on data streams. CRM and other enterprise systems also collect data from a wider range of sources, increasing the size of these databases.
Without an integration strategy in place, Finance organizations must deal with these ever-growing and multiple stores of siloed data individually. Enterprise integration helps to consolidate the data, streamlining security protocols, permissions, and data access for stronger data security across the operation. It also optimizes analytics and other insights the company can extract from the information.
3. Enable Automation and AI
29% of respondents placed automation and AI on their top three list. This is a natural progression. Once finance organizations have their cloud and data security houses in order, it’s finally time to innovate!
For what many consider a more traditional space, sometimes slow to adopt new technologies out of a culture of caution, Finance organizations are rapid adopters of AI, especially chatbots. The technology improves customer service while automating repetitive tasks, increasing efficiencies in call centers, and gaining real-time insights from the data these interactions generate.
Along with streamlining the customer experience, AI enables the business to make informed decisions about risk and other financial considerations. As a result, the decision-making process becomes more efficient and accurate.
AI is also a game-changer when it comes to fraud and other security issues. For example, an AI-powered anti-fraud engine developed by KPMG in a recent collaboration, reduces fraudulent transactions by up to 40%.
Automation is synonymous with AI, a valuable capability that delivers meaningful benefits across the operation, including increased accuracy, decreased human error, and a more responsive (and faster) customer experience.
Ironically, artificial intelligence can help redefine and restore personalized experiences that build trust for consumers and small business owners.
Achieve Your Business Objectives with Digibee’s iPaaS
Digibee’s iPaaS technology is low-code and cloud-native, enabling you to seamlessly connect all of the dots (and your IT infrastructure) so you can achieve your digital transformation objectives.
Once considered an impediment to software development, low-code was viewed as a rigid, templated coding style that hindered creativity.
Today, many software engineers and developers view low-code as a liberator…almost the AI of software development, automating mundane steps while freeing up human capital to focus on higher value work.
A low-code integration platform allows companies to extend and supplement existing workforces while facilitating automation, reducing errors, and ultimately elevating the role of software developer to that of an innovator.
In this post, we focus on how low-code integration platforms contribute to an agile and progressive business, why companies are adopting this methodology, and the overall benefits the business – and developers – achieve with a low-code model.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
What is Low-code?
Low-code is a development methodology that uses visual versus textual coding. Instead of a technical environment, low code is model-driven, using a drag-and-drop interface that is accessible to a broader range of developers. Especially for more junior team members who may not yet have the experience to produce in a highly technical environment.
Organizations benefit from greater productivity, decreased costs, and improved agility. These are meaningful results, reflected in the outlook of industry analysts who predict the worldwide low-code technologies market will grow 20% in 2023.
Low-code integration platforms deliver speed and automation, while maintaining the ability of developers to customize, transform, and orchestrate end-to-end business processes. When a low code integration platform has the ability to handle the complexity of truly enterprise environments, the result is a democratization of tasks across development teams that traditionally would be bottlenecked with integration specialists working over their personal capacity.
Why are organizations adopting low-code platforms?
Expediting the completion of key projects is instrumental to innovation and growth. To achieve these results, development cycles must be strategic and predictable, while also delivering digitally-driven outcomes to customers and partners within an evolving ecosystem.
Due to resource constraints, process/system complexity, and an ever-evolving ecosystem, many key projects are consigned to the IT backlog. The result is a painful lag between the company determining what it needs to succeed and how quickly the development team will deliver it.
A low-code integration methodology allows companies to segment IT backlog work, shortening project timelines by assigning simpler tasks to less experienced workers. Instead of important projects languishing on an ever-growing to-do list, initiatives are quickly completed. More hands make for faster work, with experienced people focusing solely on the highest value tasks.
Enterprises must eliminate redundant and time-consuming tasks, freeing up bandwidth to focus on higher value activities that satisfy individual needs and the needs of the business.
– Peter Kreslins, Digibee CTO and Co-Founder
Why are organizations adopting low code platforms?
Increasing delivery of key projects drives business results. These results include the predictable and strategic delivery of digitally driven outcomes to customers and partners in an evolving ecosystem.
The pressure to deliver outcomes is higher than ever and this demand often falls on the IT project backlog. It is no secret that the IT project backlog is growing due to resource constraints, process / systems complexity, and a digital ecosystem that is changing at an exponential rate.
These complexities can cause key business initiatives to take too long and consume so many resources that other important projects may have to be pushed aside.
A Low Code methodology leaves room for these projects that have historically lost priority while preparing you for the future of a certain increase in the amount of data generated and consumed by your organization.
What are the advantages of low-code for developers?
The prioritization of IT backlog projects depends solely upon the time and resources available to tackle the coding work. This involves the team members writing, testing, debugging, deploying, and managing environments (test and production).
The more coding required, the more likely that problems will arise. Especially if the team is under-resourced or under-skilled. As a result, the project delivery date is delayed, which pushes out the positive results it’s meant to deliver. The outcome? Missed revenue and lost business opportunities.
A low-code integration model accelerates the development process, simplifying the work and enabling the development team to deliver critical innovation projects on time and on budget.
Here are some examples of the advantages a low-code integration platform provides to developers:
Flexibility
Existing (and older) models, systems, and processes have undergone many changes, often resulting in a lack of continuity, forced freezing, and downstream compatibility issues due to a reliance on specialized coding and knowledge.
Low code removes these legacy hindrances, allowing workers to connect systems and processes in a modular way. This simple approach promotes the rapid adoption of new workflows and technologies, enabling the team to easily support (and quickly complete) modernization initiatives.
Speed
Low-code is an optimizer, providing greater speed with improved results. Reusability and embedded governance immediately accelerate the development process.
Building code using a visual (versus textual) model saves time while still allowing for manual coding as needed. Low-code also bridges the communication gap among non-IT stakeholders to further expedite the project.
Greater autonomy
Low-code democratizes processes, simplifying the development lifecycle, and supporting individual contributions. It also enables professionals with less experience (or less technical backgrounds) to contribute to the project, tasking them with work they’re able to perform.
With improved communication and collaboration between business and IT teams, it’s possible to share a holistic view of the project, keeping all stakeholders informed and aware.
More features and innovation
Low-code makes it easier to accelerate innovation cycles, offloading basic tasks to less experienced workers, and elevating senior developers to focus on new products/services and strategic projects.
A low-code integration platform delivers greater cost-efficiencies, ensuring the most expensive resources are delivering the highest ROI, while empowering less experienced developers to build and maintain integrations as they learn and grow.
How to choose a low-code platform
Low-code integration platforms support process agility and enhanced security while accelerating delivery cycles, all with a lower total cost of ownership.
Lower demand on IT while empowering junior developers
Support business users with automated workflows
Increase revenue with faster time to market
Expand existing development resources for increased efficiency, productivity, and profitability
Digibee’s low-code iPaaS
Give us your integration use case scenario, andbook a no-obligation demo(your choice of 15, 30, or 60-minutes) to learn how you can leverage our low-code iPaaS to increase efficiency, productivity, and profitability.
Innovation at Digibee is a top priority. After all, our mission is to help our customers in their digital transformation journeys, so it only makes sense that Digibee evolves on a similar path.
With some of the brightest minds in the industry, the Digibee team has an insatiable curiosity and inherent desire to continually improve how enterprises integrate and innovate. Our best ideas are based on our understanding of what’s needed and what’s next. And then we make it happen.
Case in point is the Digibee AI Assistant, a new capability in our customer training portal: the Digibee Academy 2.0. The technology is unique and AI-driven and tailored to answer questions in real-time from customers seeking information.
It’s been an exciting project and we are happy to share this with our customers! Here are some more details about how Digibee will use AI, today and into the future, to support our customers and advance our technology.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
How AI Helps Digibee Users
Digibee believes in empowering our platform users and our employees to help them achieve their true potential.
We are very proud of how intuitive the Digibee drag-and-drop platform is for Solution Engineers to learn and use, and how quickly they become proficient in building, running and monitoring integrations with our iPaaS. Yet we always strive to leverage the best available technologies and ideas to continually improve the user experience.
The advances we’re achieving with AI make it easier for everyone to find the information they need in real-time. It also provides us with important insights to better understand the needs of our users, helping to inform how we improve and evolve the Digibee platform.
There are short and long term advantages for our customers in using our platform, and our iPaaS will evolve based on what we learn – both from our users directly and from what we can glean from AI.
Unlike many integration technology vendors, the Digibee support model – including the Academy and our AI Assistant – is provided free of charge. Our customers shouldn’t have to pay to learn. And while our support is free, our customers truly experience the benefit of our platform when the training wheels come off, providing development folks and architects with total autonomy.
The transformation from perceiving integration as a growth inhibitor to utilizing it as an enabler of speedy innovation is fully realized.
The Future of AI for Digibee
The future looks bright! AI provides us with a variety of opportunities to elevate the Digibee customer experience and innovate our iPaaS technology.
For the Digibee Academy 2.0 implementation, we created a cross-functional ad hoc team from different areas within the organization, all with skills related to data science and most from within the Education team. Based on the success we’ve seen to-date, we’re exploring the creation of a formal function and/or team to support continuous development and delivery of AI-powered capabilities.
With the Digibee Academy, the model will evolve beyond a question and answer format to make proactive content recommendations based on each user’s needs. The system will also grade assignments and provide personalized feedback for users leveraging our self-serve training model.
Beyond the current implementation, we’re examining the application of AI within the Digibee iPaaS. The team is actively exploring conversational UX and other AI-powered capabilities, including enhancements to pipeline creation and maintenance workflows, the provision of smart recommendations, and the automation of tasks and processes for all users.
What’s Next?
Today, we’re actively testing the system internally at Digibee. The AI Assistant will provide real-time answers to questions regarding the content within the documentation portal. It will also help users complete self-training courses, improve their knowledge, and build a better understanding of the Digibee iPaaS.
For more information about the Digibee AI Assistant, the Digibee Academy 2.0, or Digibee’s iPaaS technology, schedule a 15 or 30 minute call with us.
On behalf of my co-founders Peter Kreslins and Vitor Sousa I am very pleased to share the news of our Series B funding round. This round brought $60 million in additional funding to Digibee, bringing our total funding to date to well over $90 million. This funding indicates a very clear endorsement of our product, strategy and our future.
The Digibee State of Enterprise Integration survey, was carried out earlier this year, compiling input and opinions from one thousand CTOs, CIOs, system architects, and web developers in North America.
The survey data provides compelling insights to the state of integration across multiple industries. In this blog post we explore some of the findings specific to Retail, one of three industry sub-reports we published.
One distinct and very interesting insight is the “why” behind enterprise integration. Based on responses from Retailers, the highest-value objectives for integration rank as follows:
Improve time to market
Migrate to/upgrade cloud, digital transformation
Enable automation and AI
One theme ties these three objectives together: Proactive investment in innovation to better compete. It’s clear that retailers can’t afford to be complacent in today’s changing landscape. And while integration hasn’t traditionally been viewed as a strategic technology, the truly insightful leaders see how integration can help enable key innovation. This insight is reflected in these objectives.
>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.
1. Improve Time to Market
Almost 35% of respondents rank time to market as the top enterprise integration objective for Retail. This makes sense when you consider the significant upside to the business, including greater market share, increased revenue, and a meaningful leg up on the competition.
When a retailer is able to reduce time to market, the business is rewarded with more selling days. Especially important within the e-commerce use case, where customers shopping online expect to find the newest products and services at their fingertips. And when they don’t, it’s an easy hop to the next online retailer.
But being first to market is only half of the equation. The product or service you deliver to your customers is also key. Accurate data analytics – especially real-time data – are critical in allowing you to meet (and even beat) customer expectations, with businesses achieving up to 70% in market share as the first to market with a new product.
Improving time to market in retail is all about greater efficiencies throughout the organization. Optimized supply chains, real-time data analytics, and e-commerce integration with adjacent software applications and systems. Retail digital transformation is essential to all of these advances, and enterprise integration is the foundation upon which it is built.
Without a truly connected environment, retailers lack the insights to understand what’s working, where improvements are needed–and most importantly–to gauge in real-time the quality of the customer experiences they deliver.
At number two on the integration objectives list for Retailers is cloud/digital transformation.
Given the speed of innovation within retail, this is not a surprising result. In recent years, we’ve seen the rapid adoption of some amazing technologies, for example, digital and curated shopping, automated checkouts, and enhancements in how retail inventory systems are managed and optimized. Digital transformation – and especially the cloud – have enabled all of these advances.
With so much opportunity, it’s no surprise companies are hopping on the retail digital transformation bus in record numbers, with most aiming to elevate the customer experience (CX) they deliver. No longer a nice-to-have, a personalized and omnichannel CX is table stakes for most retailers.
In order to evolve, retailers must shift to a composable technology stack, allowing them to rapidly adapt and adopt new technologies as needed, a non-starter with traditional monolithic retail platforms.
Enterprise integration connects the old with the new, knitting together all of the different systems and applications in the retail stack, supporting agility and flexibility in an industry where change is constant.
3. Enable Automation and AI
Retailers ranked automation and AI number three on their integration objectives list, a natural evolution once the cloud and digital transformation initiatives are in place.
When you consider the volumes of data generated by digital e-commerce, AI is an imperative. With AI, retailers are able to organize and examine data in real-time from a range of sources (e-commerce data, retail ERP systems, marketplace, customer, and competitor information, etc.)
The results speak for themselves. Data insights that support amazingly accurate demand forecasting for improved inventory management; the detection of early-stage changes in market and consumer behaviors; and, since all roads lead back to the CX, real-time data that optimizes customer interactions.
AI is helping retailers build interactive systems that streamline customer communication throughout the buying journey. This improves the quality of customer personalization and engagement.
Real-time access to accurate customer profile and order history, e-commerce chatbots, tracking of e- and in-store activities, an improved check-out experience, and even product placement are made better with AI.
AI also enables automation, a valuable capability that delivers meaningful benefits across the retail operation. All of the advances noted in the preceding digital transformation section previously fell to humans, making for time-consuming and often error-ridden work. AI frees workers from these mundane tasks while increasing accuracy and speed.
Achieve Your Business Objectives with Digibee’s iPaaS
Digibee’s low-code, cloud-native integration platform as a service (iPaaS) technology enables you to connect all of the dots (and IT infrastructure) to help you achieve your digital transformation objectives.
Download your complimentary copy of the Digibee State of Enterprise Integration for Retail sub-reporttoday for a deep dive into all of the data. Understand how your peers are progressing and examine year-over-year trends and observations to inform your integration strategy.
In 2023, Digibee’s conducted its second annual annual State of Enterprise Integration survey, reaching out to one thousand CTOs, CIOs, system architects, and web developers in North America.
In this blog post series, we examine one of the top findings in the report, as ranked by your peers. Implementation time stood out as one of the biggest challenges when embarking on an IT digital transformation strategy. Many survey respondents said while their goal was accelerating digital transformation, integration implementation took much longer and was more complicated than expected.
The 2023 data is in, and Digibee’s second annual annual State of Enterprise Integration survey, is out! We reached out to more than a thousand enterprise IT professionals – from web developers and system architects to CTOs and CIOs – across North America to understand today’s integration trends, challenges, and opportunities.
Now we’re diving into some of the key findings with a series of blog posts – this one focuses on IT budgets and the cost of integration.
Better governance results in higher quality data, which in turn supports business analytics and decision-making. 
According to 32% of the respondents, cloud/digital transformation is the top integration objective for Finance organizations. This makes a lot of sense, especially when you consider the criticality of modernization and innovation within an industry undergoing rapid change.
Finance organizations deal with a complicated security landscape, beholden to a range of regulatory bodies concerned with privacy, disclosure, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism, and other rules and regulations.
29% of respondents placed automation and AI on their top three list. This is a natural progression. Once finance organizations have their cloud and data security houses in order, it’s finally time to innovate!
When a retailer is able to reduce time to market, the business is rewarded with more selling days. Especially important within the e-commerce use case, where customers shopping online expect to find the newest products and services at their fingertips. And when they don’t, it’s an easy hop to the next online retailer.
Given the speed of innovation within retail, this is not a surprising result. In recent years, we’ve seen the 
The prioritization of AI is reflected in the global retail market numbers where 
