With the aim to revolutionize our technology solutions and turn them into modern cutting-edge products, Deda Stealth partnered with Thoughtworks, a leading global technology consultancy that integrates strategy, design, and software engineering to enable digital transformation. Together we outlined the vision and a platform strategy to incrementally evolve Stealth into a more composable-savvy set of products. A suite of independent solutions empowered by common cloudenabled platforms capabilities, along with the adoption of a new agile and lean-approach.
To execute, we selected two business functions of the ERP as a pilot: the S-OMS (Order Management System) and S-Connect (the Supply Chain collaboration platform to connect brands and suppliers), to extract from the monolith and create independent products while also upskilling the delivery team with new product thinking capabilities and agile practices.
Since embarking on this journey, we have implemented the core platform capabilities needed to enable two teams and deliver two new products that have been adopted in the market.
"Working together with TW gave us many benefits and helped us to reshape the way we provide value to our customers. It allowed for faster feedback, better alignment, and more flexibility in adapting to changing requirements and customer needs. One of the outcomes of this collaboration is the successful architecting and re-architecting of our Stealth Platform, which integrates and streamlines the business processes and data of our customers. Working together helped to enhance efficiency, productivity, and profitability and improved the customer experience and satisfaction. By working together with TW and adopting a product thinking approach we can achieve a new way to think the Stealth® platform with the ultimate goal to deliver value to our customers"
Giovanni Botta - Innovation and Technical Manager at Deda Stealth
The cross-functional teams are fully empowered to make decisions for the product they are trying to build. They work autonomously with an adaptive mindset, following modern engineering practices and a usercentered approach to understand clients’ problems and ideate new features with a very participative and short cycle from idea to solution. Both S-OMS and S-Connect are market-leading products, built to be user-friendly, easy to adopt, and personalized to contribute to our client’s efficiency and success. We aimed to deliver and evolve a focused, intuitive, and empowering user experience to gain client confidence and satisfaction.
We conducted usability tests with early adopters to measure the effort score of their key user tasks, and error rates of the key user tasks. We also observed if the users could perform their tasks independently, and where their bottlenecks were, iterating further to provide a self-service solution. From a technological perspective, Platform Thinking has driven the design and development of those products from the very beginning. General platform guidelines are provided for all the teams to follow, while independence in execution is ensured as technological choices could vary based on the business domain.
"The modernization journey started with Thoughtworks 3 years ago has brought forth a collaboration that powers the desire to work with constant curiosity, accountability, and ownership among all the people involved, since the first day. As a result, the methodology principles shared with TW have facilitated and emphasized the application of certain values such as attention to the product and customers, continuous improvement, and the quality of what has been done. I’d add that the people involved in this journey are witnesses and agents of this change which also helps to simplify the effectiveness of our internal business processes"
Luca Venerucci – Program Manager at Deda Stealth.
Each product team is autonomous and has complete control to select the appropriate technology stack to achieve the best output for the end users and customers. At the same time, an enabling platform ecosystem (built byadding specific platform capabilities) is incrementally developed in a revolutionary architecture style, using microservices. This guarantees the development of solutions that are independent and highly performant but also easy for clients and partners to integrate with.
Speaking of front-end development we used React and from the architectural point of view instead, Apache Kakfa to create a highly scalable message backbone that synchronizes microservices. The document storage, as a platform feature, will leverage Google Cloud Platform.
Given the success of the two pilots, we are now embarking on the journey toward enhancing the platform capabilities and building the next products. Deda Stealth is committed to an ambitious timeline to help its clients and partners achieve their goals.
