Customer
The customer is a large retail corporation with networks in different countries. It embraces varied spheres, from beauty products to hypermarkets. Before this case, Expert Soft contributed to the implementation of solutions for various corporations engaged in other spheres. Among them, there are luxurious brands of clothes, jewellery sales via the Internet and many others. The experience gained in other similar projects helped to successfully collaborate with the current client.
The project peculiarities
What we really liked about working with our client is that the project never stood still. There were always constant changes, teams, and processes reorganization. Everything was built the most effective and flexible way and eventually led to the result everyone had hoped to achieve.
Great emphasis was put on code testing. There were several stages of code testing to avoid any potential collapses. Special duty teams were created to maintain functionality. Such a responsible approach towards work made us highly motivated to contribute to the implementation of successful solutions.
Team performance
Expert Soft team of developers included 15 engineers: front-end, back-end, and QA engineers. They were seamlessly integrated into work with a large team of developers working on the client side and provided by other IT vendors. They worked in different teams and on different projects. Thus they showed their teamwork skills, ability to work in a versatile team and quickly adapt to new and constantly changing working conditions.
Challenge
Over a long period of its development, the corporation has absorbed a large number of local retail networks. The initial strategy was to launch an e-commerce direction for each of the networks and to use separate on-premises solutions from SAP on the Hybris Commerce platform.
However, with the increase in the number of individual platforms, the spendings related to individual frameworks have grown substantially. It was expensive to support the entire infrastructure, launch new projects, and introduce changes to all sites.
Moreover, on-premise setup required in-house server hardware, integration capabilities, and software licenses. IT employees had to be on hand to support and manage potential issues that could arise. It was difficult for the corporation to scale up since on-premises storage sometimes required hardware updating. Apart from that, it was necessary to devote workers to building the new systems. Any upgrades or changes were time-consuming and complicated.
Solution highlights
- It was decided to create a single centralised platform. Expert Soft took part in the development of that system. The aim of the platform is to quickly and inexpensively launch new projects on its basis. The decision was to switch to the Cloud-oriented solution for the architecture of this distributed system.
- With the help of headless-commerce approaches, the separation of the back-end part from the front-end one was maximized. That helped to reduce platform dependence. And what is more, the upgrades of the platform or individual solutions in one of those parts have become faster and more efficient.
- The microservice architecture was designed in part of the project to fasten business scaling.
What can we be proud of ?
Together with the team members of other global IT companies, our engineers integrated an existing framework into an application and contributed to the implementation of the following solutions:
- Multicountry SAP extension. That enables to display the same pages and components across the different sites, as well as contents that are specific to each region.
- Peerius personalization provider. It creates a personal profile for each visitor, allowing targeted recommendations at an individual level. Peerius analyzes all previous purchase and browsing behaviour. But it places the emphasis on the intent of the ongoing session, resulting in real-time personalization.
- Data import/export, integration with client’s ESB (enterprise server bus). That helps to unite all webshops, warehouses, customer resource management and product information management. All elements an e-commerce business typically has. Moreover, ESB provides load balancing where multiple copies of a component can be instantiated to increase performance. Failover support can also be provided should a component or its resources fail.
- External cart and promotion calculation. Instead of using the Hybris OOTB cart extension, an external system is used to calculate the cart. This has enabled us to perform integration faster, easier and cheaper.
- Performance improvements including hybris OOTB cache extension configuration. This has made a website work faster and improved its performance. Instead of generating a page each time a customer’s request comes, the page is generated once and used for subsequent customers’ requests.
Success
The collaboration between the company and Expert Soft has helped to reduce infrastructure, hardware and maintenance expenses. That was achieved with the help of the Cloud-oriented solution.
The cost of implementation of changes for all projects is low – the change is simply copied. The launch of new projects and the transfer of old projects to a new platform is fast and affordable. Because only a small part of the system depends on localization (UI, warehouse, payment services, order fulfilment).
Now, our customer has no need for capital investment: all payments are made on an as-needed basis. And the business can effectively scale up or down depending on overall usage, requirements, and growth.
Most importantly, the successful project implementation has evolved into a long-lasting partnership. And Expert Soft is delighted to be chosen as a technical partner of that corporation.
