Case Study: Munro Footwear Group changes ‘every system imaginable’ says CTO Keng Ng

Munro Footwear Group, home to brands including Midas and Diana Ferrari has undergone a significant digital transformation project.

Keng Ng, chief technology officer at Munro Footwear Group told Digital Nation Australia that the organisation is working to uplift its order management system, e-commerce system, internal supply chain system and ERP as well as changing its point of sales system.

“We are changing every system imaginable within our business,” said Keng.

“The problem with changing every system is we still need to keep the business running. We can’t go ‘Let’s stop selling shoes for six months, while we paint the house, change all the systems and then reopen the business,’ we can’t.

"We have to strategically and carefully remove each system and replace them with something newer, better, more fit for purpose over a period of two or three years.”

Munro Footwear Group considered a number of integration platforms including Oracle, MuleSoft and TIBCO, before ultimately choosing to work with Boomi to connect applications and automate workflows, he said.

“We settled on Boomi, not because it was the cheapest, it was actually probably closest to the most expensive,” said Keng.

“The reason why we chose Boomi is we didn't need heavy development skill to use it. If you are just a technical analyst, it's a visual drag-drop solution so we could easily train our internal resource up to use it. We can easily onboard new resources without having to find heavily developed expensive resources to use Boomi.”

Keng also said that the platform’s self-documenting nature makes it simple to see where and when changes have been made, and by whom.

“There's a lot of automation that makes a change safe and easy. Which means we can easily make mistakes and correct them," Keng explained.

"This is important because when you're trying to move fast, you're going to make mistakes. The ability to diagnose and correct mistakes is key to our pace.”