As Sandfield continues its exciting growth path, our natural evolution has led to the launch of four new business units, each focused on unlocking innovation within specialised business areas. We reflect on what has led us to this approach and the overall outcomes it helps to achieve for clients.
‘Digital First Business’, ‘Digital Disruption’, and ‘Composability’ are just a few of the strategies being employed in today’s increasingly digital-focused business environment. At the core of many of these strategies remains the overarching challenge of ‘IT innovation’ and the ability to adapt to disruption and/or opportunity. More specifically, IT innovation without the risk, cost and uncertainty that commonly occurs during large scale system replacements or digital transformation projects.
Some of the common business challenges that have led to these strategies include:
- Business is being lost due to the lack of ability to adapt and respond to changing requirements
- Productivity goes down and costs go up when data is not available when and where it's needed
- The ability to be part of an ecosystem enables businesses to leverage off industry partners to be more informed and responsive
Taking a ‘Goldilocks’ approach
At Sandfield, we generally find that customers looking for innovation don’t want to ‘reinvent the wheel’ so we built up a variety of frameworks and products to enable more time innovating and less time focusing on the generic parts of a system.
This approach has always provided the best of all worlds - ‘out-of-the box’ economy mixed with ‘outside the box’ thinking, design and delivery. You get to keep the tools and systems currently doing a great job for you and only deploy new capability where it is needed. Everything is integrated into a better overall outcome that is less disruptive and more effective.
The recent launch of our specialist business units is an evolution of this as we continue to expand our capabilities and experience in custom development, financial management, integration and supply chain. These specialised business units open up more possibilities within a ‘best of breed’ ecosystem to stay nimble and responsive whilst building on the focused expertise needed for innovation. This approach, combined with our substantial years of experience, means we can continue to deliver highly configurable, interoperable and flexible software to adapt to future modern technology – and the changing needs of business.
An important part of this evolution is empowering smaller teams to act with more flexibility, focus and freedom for our client's business goals. Something which we see as critical to delivering successful IT projects that provide a competitive edge.
Introducing our specialist business units
Sandfield’s business units now comprises of Origin Supply Chain, Crossfire Integration, On Account Financial Management System and Edge Custom Development. Whilst these could be seen as ‘common’ business areas and IT requirements, we offer something a little more special across each of them to deliver on our promise of providing a competitive edge.
Origin Supply Chain
Many companies are finding their existing logistics relationships, whether run internally or out-sourced, can’t handle the current or future complexity of their supply chains. A supply chain, by its very nature, is complex as it involves different organisations and different systems all operating within different parts of the end-to-end chain.
The Origin team understands these nuances and brings together all the transactions from multiple transport, distribution and logistics providers; linking many systems’ data and combining it into one single view within the Origin platform. Customers and their partners benefit from complete supply chain visibility, orchestration and collaboration - whilst still keeping the systems that work well for them.
Inevitably, existing operations will be missing transactions and event data. Origin can ensure whatever information gaps you have can be filled through operational systems moulded to your exact needs and are flexible to adapt for future opportunities.
Crossfire Integration
At the heart of a digital ecosystem is the ability to integrate new capabilities with existing partners and internal systems to ensure data is always available where and when it is needed.
Complex businesses, by their very nature, typically evolve into multiple data silo’d models, which often reside across multiple systems and with external partners. With that, there’s increasing internal pressures and complexity in integrating their data together. Add to that the infinite integration options and scenarios available, and things tend to get pretty complex.
Crossfire is our fully managed integration service that removes the technical complexities and risk of setting up, maintaining and supporting integrations, so customers can focus on their core business. What started as a need for existing Sandfield clients quickly became a standalone offering as we found the combination of our in-house integration platform and experienced team are able to deliver tailored, world-class integration services that truly focus on business outcomes.
On Account Financial Management System
Double-entry bookkeeping has been fundamental to the way businesses operate for centuries with its beginnings dating back to 1494. On Account makes it easy for businesses in the digital age with its enterprise accounting system designed specifically for operational ecosystems and complex account requirements. The system has been optimised over many years to intuitively deal with the financial implications of operational events, allowing you to focus more on high-payback activities. We often refer to it and what it does as ‘putting finance at the heart of operations’.
Our preferred approach is to do the hard yards upfront and implement operational and finance systems in a highly sophisticated manner. That means not settling for basic baseline pedestrian integrations that exchange the minimum amount of business information. This also means we strive to recognise every possible financial implication of an operational event. Our experience tells us that putting the effort upfront pays substantial dividends later on, providing the information that has been validated, filtered, and automatically matched and delivers sophisticated financial and operational management tools, along with significant finance efficiencies.
With On Account’s open architecture, intuitive interface and highly experienced team, our customers find that they can do more with less, no matter what scale.
Edge Custom Development
For anything that falls outside of our supply chain, integration and financial management capabilities, we have the ‘Edge Custom Development’ team. They specialise in custom software solutions to meet customers’ exact requirements and support their business innovation. With a variety of frameworks, disciplines and specialist skills within CMS, mobile apps and portals, the Edge team are the ‘mavericks’ of Sandfield, always pushing the boundaries to meet clients’ needs for digital experience, customer engagement and everything else in-between.
Sandfield’s experience in high-transactional and operational systems means the Edge team can seamlessly integrate back-end systems to provide world-class user experiences through a variety of beautifully designed and developed applications.
Better Together
More often than not, our business units work collaboratively to achieve the desired outcomes for our clients, unlocking new opportunities for innovation through our intimate knowledge of operational businesses and digital ecosystems.
To ensure the effective delivery of our suite, Sandfield’s ITOps team are experts in all aspects of cloud services, taking care of the core platform, monitoring, hosting and security requirements. As an ISO 27001 certified organisation, the entire company operates to well known and respected standards.
We’re excited about the future and how, collectively or as stand alone offerings, our new business units have the capability to really help our clients deliver more with digital innovation.
