Retiring a legacy back office and shipping web and mobile on NetSuite
An Australian enterprise was running its back office on a system nobody wanted to touch and everybody depended on. Four months later the legacy platform was switched off for good, and the business was working on Oracle NetSuite with a new web and mobile front end built around it.
Context
The back-office system had accumulated a decade of workarounds. It held the operational record, so it could not simply be turned off, but every change request queued behind a small number of people who understood it. Reporting was manual. Field staff had no mobile access at all, which meant work was captured on paper and re-keyed later — the single largest source of error in the operation.
Brief
Replace the legacy platform entirely, not partially. Stand up Oracle NetSuite as the system of record, and build the web and mobile ecosystem the business actually works in on top of it. The constraint that shaped everything: four months, and the business could not stop trading during the cut-over.
Approach
Discovery mapped the real process rather than the documented one, including the workarounds that had become load-bearing. From that we set a stage-gated plan with the cut-over as a single dated event rather than a phased drift, because a partial migration would have meant running two systems and reconciling them by hand.
Delivery ran as four parallel tracks against one schedule: NetSuite configuration and data migration; a React web application; a Flutter mobile app for field capture; and the Node.js integration layer on Microsoft Azure that held them together. Design worked a sprint ahead in Figma so engineering was never waiting on a decision. Fourteen specialists across those disciplines, one backlog, one critical path.
Governance
Weekly RAID review with the full team, not just the leads — the people closest to the migration scripts were the ones who saw the risks first. Deliverables were aligned to contractual payment milestones so commercial progress and delivery progress could not drift apart. Formal change control: every scope change impact-assessed against the four-month date and approved before work began. Status to the client in a fixed format — done, next, at risk, needed from you.
Outcome
The legacy back office was decommissioned in full, on schedule. NetSuite went live as the system of record with the web and mobile ecosystem live alongside it, which meant field capture moved from paper to the mobile app on day one rather than as a later phase.