Within the consumer product industry, market-leading companies increasingly rely on technology to further their growth and innovation agendas. Digital strategy is now inextricably tied to business strategy, making IT and digital leaders critical players in achieving business goals, from building better products to improving safety and compliance and, ultimately, growing customer preference.
Digital transformation is nothing new. Yet, business leaders continue to double down on digital strategies, recognizing the importance of technology in creating a competitive edge. IDC believes that in 2024, worldwide spending on digital technology will grow seven times faster than the overall economy.
Digitalization and the modernization of core apps and data are unlocking new ways to create value through data. By aggregating business data, organizations can mine those assets for greater insights. Data modernization also allows companies to explore data-driven technologies, like AI or GenAI. The results can be revolutionary—Forrester predicts that enterprise AI initiatives will boost productivity and creative problem-solving by 50%.
Against this backdrop, it’s clear that consumer product IT organizations have become more important than ever to advance ambitious organizational agendas through technology. For a long time, organizational optics cast IT as a cost center—something required to keep the business running but that must be contained so as not to cut too deeply into profits. But increasingly, IT is recognized as an enabler to revenue growth and competitive differentiation—a true partner to the business.
Legacy technologies weigh down digital opportunities
Evolving IT to become a better partner to the business isn’t an easy task. While companies recognize the tremendous value technology can bring, a common reality for IT teams is that they’re saddled with years of technical debt, holding them back from moving quickly and enacting change within their organizations.
Large and established consumer product companies have decades of investment in legacy infrastructures and apps. For example, they may rely on solutions built on traditional, on-premises architectures that are monolithic and today can be challenging to evolve or update without requiring substantial investments—even complete overhauls. When first deployed, these systems served business needs well; over time, as needs evolved, gaps started to emerge. Maintaining these systems can be another challenge—especially if, along the way, companies have resorted to manual integrations and processes to plug gaps. Some need dedicated staff to operate effectively.
Legacy apps and systems often hold data hostage, siloed in proprietary formats that resist easy integration with other tools, limiting visibility and opportunities to implement more data-driven decision-making throughout the organization. It’s not uncommon for consumer product companies, for example, to use multiple tools as part of their quality process. Other functions, such as compliance, might be handled by yet another host of tools. The result is that companies work with fragmented views of their processes. Large amounts of fragmentation get in the way of adopting advanced data analytics technologies, including AI, disrupting digitization opportunities.
Break free of the old with an integrated approach
To break the chains of technical debt, IT leaders need to modernize aging infrastructures and applications. Modernization can be a catalyst for removing barriers caused by too much complexity—simplifying the number of siloed point solutions is necessary to get the job done, cutting back on the volumes of fragmented data, and streamlining management and operations for IT staff.
One way consumer product enterprises are approaching challenges to modernizing and simplifying is by implementing solutions that are part of a unified platform. These solutions have the advantage of providing IT teams common ground across platform tools, which are often integrated by design. They reduce the burden on IT staff, freeing their time for more strategic digital initiatives.
Platform solutions also provide a centralized approach to processes, documents, and data, increasing visibility throughout the entire consumer product organization. Veeva’s solutions, for example, streamline collaboration across the product development lifecycle from R&D innovations and regulatory compliance to quality and marketing or other vital process areas.
In short, rather than managing tens or hundreds of point solutions, IT teams are increasingly able to manage key business processes on just a few major platforms. This enables IT staff to be more agile in responding to business needs and IT leaders to be truly proactive partners to the business.
At Veeva, we think a lot about how our platforms can aid IT leaders in growing operating leverage with the business to become stronger partners to their business leaders. Our Vault platform aims to accelerate technology modernization with solutions that bring together core consumer product business functions, from quality to compliance, and much more.
Find out more about how Veeva solutions can help IT teams modernize and simplify at https://www.industries.veeva.com/information-technology.
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