Supermind — Automating wholesale and retail ordering processes

“When you’re a small business, and you’re growing rapidly, a partner that helps you navigate the new is the most important asset you can have. Zure helped us understand the benefits of cloud-native applications, as well as their nature and requirements. With their help, we also got things cleaned up on our end.”

Jani Kärkkäinen, founder, Supermind

Supermind® is a software company that serves the retail and wholesale business sectors by specializing in automating ordering processes. The company’s product, also called Supermind, consists of three major components that each offer a solution to a specific problem — Assortment management, demand forecasting, and automated replenishment. Together, these components form a state-of-the-art software solution for managing complex supply-chain environments.

Goal

The overall goal was to help Supermind® maintain a competitive edge by responding faster and more efficiently, both internally and with clients. To do that, the company would need to rely less on virtual machines in favor of more cloud-native applications. In addition, Supermind® sought the introduction of other services that could help them simultaneously optimize costs and improve efficiency. 

Problem

Supermind® had been using basic Microsoft Azure services, but administrators of the Turku-based company realized they needed assistance to make the most of Azure’s resources. Supermind® leaders wanted a local partner who could speak their language — literally and professionally — and who had the expertise to help them understand and more efficiently navigate cloud-native applications and other services available. As it turns out, Zure was exactly the right partner to help Supermind® make something good even better.

“When it comes to problems and solving them, it has been totally easy for us. We describe what kind of help we need, and they just solve it”.

Implementation

The first step was to transfer Supermind® to Zure’s cloud solution provider (CSP) Azure subscription, which streamlined the company’s administrative billing tasks, technological infrastructure and immediately helped to lower costs. Monthly meetings quickly spot anomalies and address issues as they arise, and quarterly innovation and service reviews provide a wider snapshot of Supermind’s needs and ways Zure can address them. 

A security review allowed expert programmers to access source code, test software, and recommend improvements that enhanced the overall security of the Supermind® product. Also, a database analysis was conducted to help the company improve how it maintains its professional information storage system.

Benefits achieved

Not only did Zure assist Supermind® with optimizing its basic cloud-native applications, it also introduced many other services the company had not previously realized were available in Azure. Zure explained how those services worked and offered details about how the services would benefit Supermind®. 

As a result, Supermind® has optimized costs, enhanced the security of its product, and implemented innovative solutions to some of its most complex technological issues — And clients have started to take notice. Some have even commented about the improved availability of services.

“It was immediately a good partnership. I would recommend their services to others and have done so a few times already. For small or midsize companies, they really know how to deal with the cloud-native services”.

Continuous improvement

In the future, we will continue

• Innovate and push new ideas on how to manage and monitor Azure utilizing Microsoft’s best practices
• Drive costs down by optimizing resources by right sizing, reservations and suggesting new Azure services
• Assist on issues as they arise
• Build our role as a trusted advisor regarding Supermind’s Azure environment and software development