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Pivoting my parents' homegrown ERP business from the traditional software sales model (one-time sale with annual support contracts) to a SaaS model with MRR to

Pivoting my parents' homegrown ERP business from the traditional software sales model (one-time sale with annual support contracts) to a SaaS model with MRR to grow and scale the company. This also comes with changing the organization’s mindset and tools used. I have to say that the technical challenges of bringing in modern web technologies to interface with legacy systems has been an interesting (and frustrating at times!) experience. After working as a software dev for a number of years before taking this on, I’ve been jumping between sales, marketing, devops, management, and actual software development all in a day.

jlevers 7y ago
That sounds really cool -- I'd be interested to hear more about some of the hurdles you've encountered integrating modern web tech and old enterprise software. Any particularly notable challenges you'd be willing to share?
- acwan93 7y ago
  It comes down to working on a project that’s been continuously changing over the span of three decades. Over the years my parents have customized their offerings to account for numerous clients (our focus is on wholesale distributors). Keeping track of inventory gets especially complicated when you start dealing with variants such as colors, sizes, perishables, and pre-packaged goods (our customers sell in pallets or individually). Because of this the systems end up become getting fragmented over time to handle all these different cases and specific needs for customers. Before I joined, the developers have attempted to unify as much as they could, but the business need wasn’t quite there to justify it as much as it should. Building out our initial SaaS offerings have helped a lot for us since there’s the concept of only having one set of code running on an instance. Because of that, we’re able to abstract away all of the different nuances of each system such that the cloud servers don’t end up in a fragmented state as well, but leaving the on-premise legacy system as it is for now. The plan is for the core ERP to eventually move in that direction, but so far we’re chipping away all the edge add-ons and functions first, such as API integrations with Shopify, Amazon, etc. and building e-commerce storefronts for our customers in React/Node.js.

jlevers 7y ago

That sounds really cool -- I'd be interested to hear more about some of the hurdles you've encountered integrating modern web tech and old enterprise software. Any particularly notable challenges you'd be willing to share?

acwan93 7y ago
It comes down to working on a project that’s been continuously changing over the span of three decades. Over the years my parents have customized their offerings to account for numerous clients (our focus is on wholesale distributors). Keeping track of inventory gets especially complicated when you start dealing with variants such as colors, sizes, perishables, and pre-packaged goods (our customers sell in pallets or individually). Because of this the systems end up become getting fragmented over time to handle all these different cases and specific needs for customers. Before I joined, the developers have attempted to unify as much as they could, but the business need wasn’t quite there to justify it as much as it should. Building out our initial SaaS offerings have helped a lot for us since there’s the concept of only having one set of code running on an instance. Because of that, we’re able to abstract away all of the different nuances of each system such that the cloud servers don’t end up in a fragmented state as well, but leaving the on-premise legacy system as it is for now. The plan is for the core ERP to eventually move in that direction, but so far we’re chipping away all the edge add-ons and functions first, such as API integrations with Shopify, Amazon, etc. and building e-commerce storefronts for our customers in React/Node.js.