Thinking
vendor lock-in
All articles tagged with "vendor lock-in".
Platform capabilities and technical insights
Composable Commerce Architecture: Building Modular Systems That Evolve With Your Business
A Midlands foodservice distributor spent £240,000 recovering from a pricing error in 2024. Their monolithic commerce platform took three days to update prices across 12,000 SKUs. Commodity costs moved faster than their approval cycle. By the time new prices went live, margins had eroded. The problem wasn't the platform. It was the architecture. Pricing, inventory, and order management sat in one system. Upgrading the pricing engine meant ripping out everything else. The platform vendor quoted 18 months and £180,000 for a custom pricing module. The distributor couldn't wait that long. This is the composable commerce question: when one component fails, can you swap it without dismantling the entire system?
Operational workflow improvement
Why Big 4 Partnerships Fail at Operational Decision Implementation: The Deloitte-Palantir Model Exposed
Most mid-market distributors engage Big 4 consultancies expecting a one-time project. They end up in perpetual dependency that costs £500K-£2M+ annually. This isn't accidental — it's the business model. Contract structures, methodology licensing, and support dependencies lock you in. Here's how the economics work, and what independence actually requires.