FuturMaster - Leveraging Data, Technology & Business Expertise to Thrive in this New Era

Leveraging Data, Technology & Business Expertise to Thrive in this New Era

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PA R T N E R

B U S I N E S S I N T E RV I E W

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Leveraging Data, Technology & Business Expertise to Thrive in this New Era Julien Chidiack, Chief Cloud Officer at FuturMaster, shares how his company is helping to support its customers to thrive in today’s challenging world.

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uturMaster has been in existence for almost 30 years, providing supply chain planning and trade promotions management and optimisation (TPx) solutions, which are especially important in this day and age, as Chief Cloud Officer, Julien Chidiack, explains, “We are in tough times, with an accelerated transition to a new way of living, highlighted by global crisis such as the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, high inflation, and the shortage of energy. The market status quo has been completely disrupted.

This disruption is challenging all businesses and functions, but particularly supply chain. Businesses must reinvent their way of operating to make better plans due to the high volatility and uncertainty in the market.”

At the core of FuturMaster’s market vision, there’s the strong belief that if you want to remain competitive

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over the next three to five years, you need to be closer to your end consumers and leverage all the possibilities within your extended supply network, from your end consumers to your suppliers and their suppliers.

Julien continues, “The challenge is that when you look to fully unleash the agility and resilience that exist in your extended supply network, you end up

facing complexity. At FuturMaster, we believe that this requires companies to be equipped with the right tools and technologies to manage the complexity, such as smart algorithms for global optimisation.”

Julian adds, “Another challenge for companies is to face hyper volatility.

As the demand closer to consumers is less volatile, CSCOs can leverage

them. We also have more and more variables which impact sales. Using them leads to lower volatility but requires technology that is capable to forecast at scale; processing massive volumes of data, supporting auto cleansing, considering external variables which impact sales by automatically determining best-fit effects etc. All these transformations require the ability

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to build flexible data pipelines and a decision-centric system.”

The ability to be agile in this new paradigm is a matter of survival for many companies. Julian highlights, “There have been many papers on this subject including one from The World Economic Forum (‘Readiness for the Future of Production Report’), which states that companies that are ready to adapt but are not doing it yet might face tomorrow alongside new contenders, which will challenge them. The new companies coming into this market naturally leverage technology to be more efficient, so this ability to be agile is very important.”

FuturMaster provides its customers with technology, a data-driven approach and business expertise to cope with the challenges of the 21st century. Julien says, “This differentiated approach enables us to build bestfit solutions that maximise the value creation for our customers and help them gain an edge over their competitors.

Technology is an effective way to leverage the agility to be more effective. Our 6

platform is highly configurable, allowing us to build solutions for our customers that best fit their company’s strategy, their context, and their evolving needs over time.

You cannot go to the market and take an out-of-the-box project that will solve your problems. By combining technology, a datadriven approach and business

“By combining technology, a data-driven approach and business expertise, we build best-fit solutions on top of our platform to help our customers maximise all the benefits” Julien Chidiack, Chief Cloud Officer

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DIGITAL SOLUTIONS FOR YOUR INSURANCE COVER

CLOUD FOR BUSINESSES HYPERSCALERS AND CLOUD EXPERTISE Public Cloud started over fifteen years ago and has brought added value for all industries. These days, best practices are numerous and guarantee that cloud solutions provide more agility, innovation and cost efficiency.

Before utilising Cloud services, companies must assess the client maturity on Cloud systems questioning: • What would be the impact on the Business?

• How will people be supported during the transformation?

• Which governance should be put in place?

• What is the right platform/ architecture for the required solution?

• How to guarantee end-to-end security in different scenarios?

Companies need to engage in technical discussions and transformational ones, where experts that already delivered multiple projects advise on the right methodology and support. This ensures time-saving, avoids making the wrong decisions and the use of the correct framework.

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STRONG PARTNERSHIPS TO SUPPORT YOUR CLOUD JOURNEY, AS COMPLEX CHALLENGES SHOULD NOT BE FACED ALONE Storm Reply has been an exclusive partner of AWS and, since 2014, the company is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. With over 500 projects delivered on AWS platforms, and a footprint in Italy, Germany, UK and France, Storm Reply has partnered with all industries to face the market challenges, by building multiple solutions and assisting each organisation with their AWS transformation.

FuturMaster has provided planning solutions for supply chain for almost 30 years; an industry that has been particularly disrupted in the recent years. FuturMaster believes that to leverage all the possibilities of the extended supply network, the organisation needs to be equipped with the right tools, technologies and the right partners. These are essential to manage the complex process of building an extended supply network.

As such, businesses are finding that they must reinvent their way of operating to make better plans, due

to the high volatility of the market.

The partnership of Storm Reply and FuturMaster empowers customers to leverage the power of data through technology, so that they are able to maximise the potential within their supply network and build agility and resilience for the future.

SAAS SOLUTIONS ADVANTAGES OF USING SAAS SOLUTIONS, LEVERAGING HYPERSCALERS AND CLOUD EXPERTISE Beyond the business value that a SaaS platform provide, to be successful these services need to ensure the highest level of security combined with the right level of performance.

SaaS enables the reduction of the project timeline which benefits the company with lower costs and increases the scalability of the project (less integration needs). It also promotes innovation within the organisation with immediate releases available for all staff - outcomes that are only possible with hyperscalers (automated APIs and ready-to-use services).

With a hyperscaler, you can automatically scale up and down with servers, containers, etc in a few

minutes and automatically deploy the ready-to-use application. This reduces the installation and configuration time and can also reduce the software deployment issues.

The combination of SaaS and hyperscalers, allow for software upgrades to become available for all customers simultaneously with lower costs and resources than the ones required in the traditional model (upgrade package purchase to install it or pay for specialised services to install it).

SaaS offerings come with baked-in best practices and samples - bringing the new on-demand pricing model from Hyperscalers – which, enables proof-of-concepts or testing of the software functionality in advance for free.

Beyond the technical features that Hyperscaler brings, AWS is enabling software companies to reach new streams: • New clients can be reached, thanks to AWS global footprint • New size of business, thanks to AWS scale up and down • New resale model, thanks to AWS marketplace

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expertise, we build best-fit solutions to help our customers maximise all the benefits.”

So, what are the advantages of using a SaaS solution that leverages hyperscalers and cloud expertise?

Julien answers, “We work with global companies supplying new 10

technologies that we can utilise to improve our planning solutions.

Since 2020, we have shifted towards providing our Bloom platform and leveraging the public cloud. On top of our technology and supply expertise, we now offer cloud expertise, so our customers can leverage the best of hyperscalers to

“We work with global companies supplying new technologies that we can utilise to improve our planning solutions. Since 2020, we have shifted towards providing our Bloom platform and leveraging the public cloud”

deploy their FuturMaster solution virtually everywhere. We are also developing technologies around the possibilities that the cloud unlocks to accelerate the time it takes to perform forecasts at scale and global end-to-end optimisation.”

A huge consideration for companies

today is sustainability. Julien adds, “Our platform is more sustainable because it leverages the cloud. By not running our own data centres, we are able to minimise our energy consumption, using on-demand and serverless technologies. We have a customer operating in South Africa, and thanks to the SaaS platform, we can deliver the infrastructure in South Africa without having to build a new data centre.”

According to Julien, the changing times call for a complete revolution of the way companies operate, as opposed to simply optimising what they have been doing for decades. He explains, “Rethinking your way of working so it becomes more sustainable in this new era is key. When you are dealing with a big project, it comes with a lot of history and context, so it would be very hard to do it all on your own. It might require new expertise that you have not built because it is not part of your core business.

FuturMaster is a software editor first and foremost, so when we decided to move to a SaaS project, it involved a lot of different expertise. We 11

“Storm Reply is our strategic technology partner for consolidating the way we are working with SaaS. They have worked with us to define the new SaaS architecture and realise it over time” quickly realised that doing this shift alone could result in problems with scalability etc, so we decided to leverage our strategic partners to help us in our transformation journey because they had the right expertise.”

FuturMaster views its partners as more than just suppliers. Julien says they have been selected because they really want the company to achieve its goals. Two such partners are AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Storm Reply.

Julien elaborates, “AWS is a public 12

cloud provider and hyperscaler, which is the underlying platform we use for our Bloom SaaS platform. They provide all the global infrastructure, computer services and support to help us build an efficient platform. Storm Reply is our strategic technology partner for consolidating the way we are working with SaaS. They have worked with us to define the new SaaS architecture and realise it over time.”

Julien is excited by several projects that FuturMaster is currently

MAKING THE CLOUD WORK FOR YOU! With over 500 projects delivered on AWS platforms, 600 AWS certified people and with a footprint in Italy, Germany, UK and France, Storm Reply has partnered with companies from all industries to faced the continuous market challenges, by building multiple solutions and assisting each organisation with their AWS transformation.

Storm Reply has been an exclusive partner of AWS and, since 2014, the company is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner.

Storm Reply works to understand each client context and expected outcomes; assesses the current scope and introduces innovative proposals, builds a solid foundation for the future, and implement solutions on AWS. Following best practice, Storm Reply commits to deliver to the highest standards, within restrictive timelines and leaning on its expertise to be jointly successful with our partners.

Businesses are finding that they must reinvent their way of operating to make better plans, due to the high volatility of the market. The partnership of Storm Reply and AWS empowers customers to leverage the power of data through technology, so that they are able to maximise the potential within their supply network and build agility and resilience for the future.

With over 12 competencies on AWS such Data & Analytics, Devops, Migration, IoT, Saas, Security, Financial services,

“STORM REPLY HAS BEEN AN EXCLUSIVE PARTNER OF AWS AND, SINCE 2014, THE COMPANY IS AN AWS PREMIER CONSULTING PARTNER” Energy, Retail and others, Storm Reply advises the clients that are just starting with AWS and those that are already engaged and need to accelerate their progress in a secured, technical and financial way.

With Cloud architects, Devops engineers, Finops experts, SRE, project leaders, and professionals specialised in change management, Storm Reply builds experienced teams that meet client expectations with clear deliverables and SLA’s. We are betting our reputation on each project.

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working on. He says, “Thanks to the SaaS solution, we will soon provide our customers with forecast at scale technology that allows them to do forecasts for massive volumes in a few minutes. We leverage serverless technologies in parallel – technology that scales based on the amount of resources that you need.

You do not need to manage servers; you simply handle your code and make sure it can work on the technology, to parallelise calculations and make it faster. This ability even allows our customers to do their mass forecasts with more granularity.”

FuturMaster is also working on its data integration platform in response to customers asking for their APIs to integrate with FuturMaster. Julien adds, “In addition, we are looking at integrating with our customers’ own APIs to allow better integration between ourselves and the different systems of our customers. It is all about helping to prepare our customers for this new era.”

For further information on FuturMaster, visit www.futurmaster.com 15

www.futurmaster.com