This Cloud Migration Guide is our latest contribution to Erbis business educational strategy. This study is made for all those who run online business and concern about cost-effectiveness, scalability, high performance, security, and remote access.

Get the most out of our expertise.

We’ve combined best practices with our experience and came up with an organized and logical structure. This paper will conduct you through the complex migration process highlighting the principal migration stages and warning possible bottlenecks. The most practical thing it provides is the answer – to migrate or not to migrate?

In the next 6 minutes, you’ll know more about reasons to migrate and the competitive advantages of cloud adoption. We analyze the most appropriate time for your big move and provide you with a clear action plan. 

Get some tips on how to rethink your IT infrastructure and select a reliable partner among many. Choosing the best migrating path can be a bone of contention, too. We’ve detailed and visualized 5 existing ways of migration, with their pros and cons. 

Not sure about the provider? Please take a look at our comparative table with the leading vendors featured. And last but not least, stumble upon possible bottlenecks now, rather than at the midway.

9 out of 10 startups fail because their solution has no market fit. This indicates that the software development analysis stage was skipped or conducted wrong. In such a case all further design, coding, and testing have little sense.

Seeing a big picture is vital when you begin developing software. So before you start crafting your product, take a look at the most common and secure software development life cycle to grasp the concept of how a complete process looks like.

1. Analysis

Goal: To gather requirements and define the direction of the development process.

Mistakes made during the analysis phase are the most expensive to fix later. This is the only time to build a foundation for your future product:

• Carry out user research;
• Analyze the competitors;
• Establish business goals;
• Measure success;
• Map the customer journey;
• Plan the budget.

It’s important to take into account the team on the client’s side. Its in-depth knowledge about the product goals and requirements, level of industry knowledge, and readiness to collaborate will contribute to the overall strategy and will make the discovery stage more effective. It’s crucial to engage at least one person from the client’s side to get a better understanding of the scope and goals of your product. Such interaction will help to write a detailed Software Requirements Specification (SRS) and to eliminate risks such as understaffing, over budget, and lack of market demand.

Outcome: Setting requirements and writing SRS

2. Product Design

Goal: To convert requirements into detailed software architecture.

Product design can be divided into three fundamental components:

• Functionality;
• Appearance;
• Quality.

Functionality is the priority of an Architect. By narrowing the focus he helps business and technical teams work together on a product that targets both clients’ needs and business goals.

Appearance is a tangible input of UX designers that conduct user research followed by sketching (any kind of it), prototyping, and creating MVP.

Quality stands for meeting customer needs and expectations with a product.

All the above components should be sourced from the SRS document that is a reference point for everyone involved in the project. The vital thing here is a vast understanding of the context for the existence of the software under development. The more detailed the description of how the application needs to be created would be, the less additional input developers will require at the next coding stage.

Outcome: Software design description.

3. Software Development

Goal: Translate the design of the system into code.

This is a lengthy phase though less complicated than the previous two. Using the design description, programmers code the modules using the chosen programming language. The coding tasks are divided between the team members according to their skillset. Front-end developers create codes for displaying an application or product UI and the elements users need to interplay with the site. Their Back-end counterparts are in charge of the technical side of a product.

Establish conditions for organized and consistent coding:

• Use proper guidelines;
• Supervise every developer;
• Automate deployment process;
• Nourish the best programming practices.

Well-written code significantly reduces the number of test runs and maintenance-related problems at the next stages. At Erbis we use innovative design and development practices to drive our client’s growth.

Outcome: testable, functional software, and a Source Code Document.

4. Product Testing

Goal: Code verification and bugs detection.

There is one step missing before mass-production testing. It consists of Quality Assurance (QA), Quality Control (QC), and Testing. While these are technically separate parts of the development process dependent on project size, stakeholders often group them as they have the same end goal: make a high-quality product.

Let’s figure out the difference:

• Quality Assurance. This is a process-oriented activity aimed to ensure that the team manages and creates deliverables consistently. The role of QA is to identify the reason for the error and to re-engineer the system so that such defects won’t appear any further. Thus focusing efforts on improving QA processes is one of the best investments an organization can make.
  • Quality Control. This is a product-oriented performance related to intermediate and final results of development. Examples of QC include technical reviews, software testing, and code inspections.
    • Testing. The tester creates tests and observes the behavior of the particular program under certain conditions. He fills in the documentation and returns it to developers. The best way to ensure that tests are run regularly is to automate them.

Outcome: Software is completely free of bugs and compliant.

5. Deployment

Goal: Software delivery to a target device.

Software deployment refers to the process of running a product on a server or device and can be summarized in three general phases: 

• Preparation; 
• Testing;
• Deployment. 

A piece of software may be deployed several times during the software development lifecycle depending on its functioning and error check results. If it runs smoothly and the way it was intended, then consider your software ready to be launched for beta testing. The support team collects feedback from the first users, and if any bugs come up, the development team fixes them. After that, the final version is rolled out.

Outcome: Fully operational software in a live environment.

6. Maintenance

Goal: Ongoing security monitoring and update.

The process of software development is a never-ending cycle as the plan rarely turns out perfect when it meets reality. In most cases, product maintenance is the continuous phase intended to keep the software stable and up to date. If any new bugs and vulnerabilities appear, the maintenance team will mitigate them or flag them to be addressed in a future version of the software.

There are 2 types of maintenance:

• Corrective. This means the fixation of defects that are rooted in production. They emerge because removing all the faults before delivery is extremely difficult.
• Adaptive. It’s an addition of requirements you didn’t have in the original plan. Such modification takes shape due to environment or input data change.

Outcome: Utter user experience and productivity.

Conclusion

These steps are roughly the same from one software development life cycle model to another. They tend to occur in this order, though they can also be mixed into a rapidly-repeating cycle (like Agile) or break down into linear sequential phases (like Waterfall). No matter the method the desired result is a competitive and customer-oriented product.

Look at our latest case on re-architecting and maintaining a supply chain management system here.

A global pandemic has changed the world of retail irrevocably. In response to COVID-19, an unprecedented number of shoppers have made purchases online for the first time. Among them are old and rural consumers that will continue to adopt digital. Changes in consumer behavior will be lasting and many will maintain new digital habits in a post-pandemic world.

So get ready for the new e-commerce normal. You have little time left to update your supply chain management for improving business and providing seamless consumer experience. Below are the major problems of logistics companies.

Problem 1. Predictability

Of course, each shipper wishes to satisfy the customer. But don’t get wrong with false promises. You should be hyper-accurate with the word given. Treat it like an oath. It’s far better to indicate a 2-3 day delivery period than say 2-day and to lose.

Recent surveys show that getting an item to a customer when expected is more important than getting it as fast as possible. We’d prefer a tomorrow delivery at 7-8 pm rather than today’s from 2 till 8 pm. That makes sense, right?

Solution

Make your Service Level Agreement consistent and coherent. This is where setting realistic customer expectations becomes essential for retention and loyalty. No need to show all the backstage, as a customer wants to measure the result and get what he’d expect to for his money. In this case, the trend to increase delivery speeds at all costs can surprisingly lead to unhappy customers. The same will provoke the unexpected calls after ticking off ‘don’t call me’.

Problem 2. Supply Chain Visibility

Supply chain visibility is control over your business thanks to information. It has a direct impact on revenue growth, cost cut, and reduces invested capital. Though achieving it remains an elusive goal. Supply chain networks, technologies, regulations, and business models are continuously changing. So are the rules for success. It’s a moving target with no silver bullet for it. 

Logistics visibility software is worth investment only if companies also spend time, money, and resources to walk their supply chain, from start to finish, with their own feet.

Solution

It has never been easier for organizations to adopt automation software solutions as it is now. Cost-effective cloud-based solutions make automated field processes accessible now for smaller budgets and fleets. 

You can rely on dynamic data, which puts you in control with accurate information about suppliers, carriers, systems, and customers. Such kind of visibility data reflects rates and pricing and enables intelligent routing, automated pickups, proactive tracking, and automatic payment reconciliation. You have no right to say: “I can’t afford to automate my field processes for financial reasons.” That’s not true anymore.

Problem 3. Last-mile delivery

According to statistics, delivery executors have to make as many as 150 trips for every 100 deliveries. Such difference occurs due to fuzzy addresses, unresponsive customers, heavy traffic, or last-minute cancellation. Last-mile delivery is considered as the most important and painful element in the logistics and supply chain business. It is the key to customer satisfaction and makes up the lion’s share of delivery costs. So, if done right, it can save a ton of time and money which in turn can make your business both efficient and profitable. As such, the segment becomes the first place to implement new technologies.

Solution

Since increasingly more consumers are looking for different delivery methods, last-mile delivery has become an option for retailers looking to add value to their services. To deal with this, you need to look to AI-driven technologies that analyze big data in real-time and adapt the delivery process accordingly. 

Consumers themselves would like to check up where their parcel is. The most friendly solution for that is crowd-sourced deliveries which allow them to open a mobile app and order coffee to the office, change order details, and contact courier if needed.

Problem 4. Software Development

Although there are a variety of logistic software startup companies targeting a last-mile niche, it becomes difficult for large-scale retailers and delivery companies to incorporate such tools into one consistent system. Ready-made software demonstrates real-time data without any forecasts while the ability to predict the delivery time as accurately as possible. 

Solution

In most cases, large companies using third-party logistics services (3PL) for the last mile delivery must develop their own software solution meeting the needs of clients, retailers, and carriers.

For example, customers opt for flexibility and easy returns, retailers try to mix in-house and 3PL delivery services, while carriers struggle for cutting costs and safety.

To understand where to start, it’s better to prioritize challenges and estimate the solution cost, including a ready-to-use one and those, need crafting. We at Erbis can become your reliable partner for creating an utterly polished product.Look through latest supply chain solution developed by our team for one of the leading global logistics provider: Latest supply chain solution.