There is a quiet path to modernizing your shop floors and factories. Emphasis on quiet, because “Digital Transformation” has always been loud, louder, and loudest. It causes strain on the organization’s resources with the costs of downtime and disruption often exceeding limits, ultimately slowing breakeven. Studies show 70% of these digital transformation efforts did not achieve the planned ROI.
Recently, the industry has been warming up to a different approach that Trigent is a strong advocate for: progressive modernization. Rajesh Asher, who works as the Associate Vice-President of Business Development at Trigent, fondly calls it the Quiet Fix!
The Quiet Fix
When you bolt a new module on top of your existing system without any lock-in or costly overhauls, that’s a quiet fix. Now this add-on unlocks a step increase in functionality, unleashing a new degree of capability for targeting a point high-impact problem.
Recently, an electronics manufacturer retrofitted a Raspberry-Pi + sensor module onto their legacy ERP system to extract real-time performance data. What previously functioned as a blackbox, the ERP system is now a transparent machine. Operators receive instant anomaly alerts, gain time-on-task visibility, and have access to ample data to perform root cause analysis and performance improvements.
This is not just about solving a high-impact problem, but quietly securing a quick and easy win.
More Examples of Quiet Fixes
- Power BI dashboards pulling in structured data from ERP and Excel Sheets
- GPT-powered sales assistants that fetch structured insights from CRM, ERP, and spreadsheets – returning answers through chatbot.
- Prebuilt test scripts and checklists to assess cybersecurity risks across core and edge systems.
Quiet Fixes are ideal when you wish to extend the scope of an already high-functioning system. But what if the system is proving to be a bottleneck? That brings us to Quiet Rebuild.
The Quiet Rebuild
A premium health products manufacturer decided to do away with a siloed third-party inventory software owing to its expensive license, inventory inaccuracy, and limited integration with the rest of the systems (CRM, Picking, and Finance).
They replaced the rigid monolithic system with a flexible modular system that enabled real-time inventory visibility and end-to-end product traceability. Products were tracked in real-time to the level of each warehouse, shelf, bin, lot, and sub-lot, enabling the manufacturer to avoid excess inventory and stockouts.
Why does this qualify as a quiet rebuild? Because the new system is modular, composable, and integratable. It was able to seamlessly connect with other systems through custom APIs and prebuilt connectors. The shift happened without disrupting code business workflows, allowing the manufacturer to modernize their inventory stack without a loud infrastructure overhaul.
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The Not-so-Loud Fix
Sometimes, the problem is rooted not so much in the systems, but in the way the work gets done. A personal care manufacturer, for instance, relied on a manual picking process. When the order is confirmed, the human picker walks a certain distance to reach the appropriate shelf, picks the required quantity, and prepares it for shipping. He later updates the inventory system in minutes, sometimes hours later. This manual workflow came with limitations. For one, the picker had to rely on memory and training to navigate to the correct shelf. If the picker got the wrong quantity, they had to retrace their steps and repeat the process.
The process redesign introduced a hybrid mobile app integrated with a Bluetooth scanner. The app recommends the shortest route to the shelf, streamlining navigation. Once the picker scans the barcode, the mobile app validates both the product and its quantity, ensuring accuracy at the source.
The impact was immediate. Daily order picking rose from 80-100 to 250-300. Picker training time dropped from two weeks to just four hours. More importantly, with real-time validation at the point of pick, the inventory was updated in real-time.
The not-so-loud fixes often focus on optimizing your process. Manual workflows are replaced by flexible, AI and API-friendly ones that seamlessly work with the existing stack. A process change requires that the workforce adapts to new ways of working. But once the transition is accomplished, it begins to deliver fast and high-impact wins.
Noiseless Replacement
What if your core system proves to be the culprit? A truck manufacturer used a third-party software to manage its parts information. Around 1000 users were using the system to update the parts information, The system was heavily customized to meet the unique business needs, and was maintained at a significant annual cost. Further customization demanded considerable time, effort, and cost.
The manufacturer ultimately decided to pull the plug on the platform and focused its efforts on building a purpose-built system using a low-code/no-code solution. This approach offered two inherent advantages: rapid time to market and lower cost of build.It also eliminated the problem of vendor lock-in. Remarkably, the total cost of development was lower than the annual cost of the previous third-party software. The new system enabled users with quick and intuitive access to information through advanced, predictive search.
The replacement wasn’t completely without disruption. The workforce needed time to adjust to the new solution. However, since the UI and UX resembled the older system, the transition was smooth.
Four Quiet Moves. One Strategic Direction
- In the quiet fix, you introduce a new module on top of an existing system to solve specific pain points.
- In quiet rebuild, you replace a rigid system with a flexible system that grows with business needs.
- No-so-loud fixes replace manual processes with automated workflows that improve efficiency and accuracy.
- In noiseless replacements, a modular solution replaces a monolithic system to deliver more agility and lower costs.
These help sum up progressive modernization. Across all the four cases, you can see that the features of modularity, composability, API-integration, and AI-readiness are at the heart of the solutions. They play a pivotal role in achieving the business outcomes, quietly but powerfully.
