Their monolithic commerce platform showed its limitations became unstable as their eCommerce grew, affecting both revenue and innovation. As their trusted digital partner, we jumped in to develop a new eCommerce platform to improve stability, scalability and time-to-market. Together, we made the bold choice to combine Outsystems, commercetools and Contentful – the first time anyone put these leading systems together.
Good understanding is key
We knew that a good understanding of the daily store processes was key. Working closely with store managers, domain experts and SAP/ABAP consultants from Coop, we gathered all the input we needed. Within three months, we had identified seven key processes, captured them all in one place, and started a pilot. Our agile product team worked closely with stores to measure, learn and improve.
Tidy store, happy customer
The new Store Operations Application is doing what it’s supposed to do: making life easier for Coop’s store employees. Users save up to 45 minutes per day on average by speeding up routine tasks like waste registration, ordering, and due date checks. Customer queries, for example about stock, are easily answered. To store managers, what matters most is a spotless store, stocked shelves, and a satisfied customer. We made sure that’s exactly what they can focus on right now.
1 webshop became 6 projects
OutSystems has never been used as the front end of a webshop before. This required a highly innovative approach in close collaboration with PLUS. Challenge accepted. Meanwhile, PLUS realized that this would also be a good moment to address its challenges with the data landscape. The use of Intershop resulted in thirteen different data systems that updated Intershop once a day. Updating the online search results took another day, resulting in a painful two-day delay. Taking data along increased the project scope significantly, which resulted in a program covering six separate projects. These included the data infrastructure, a retail management portal, the CMS, the eCommerce engine and two separate front ends.
Next-level commerce
The unique combination of OutSystems, commercetools and Contentful enables PLUS to create next-level shopping experiences that are accessible, convenient and differentiating. Combined, the three solutions guarantee an uptime of 99,99%, taking away previous stability issues. Scalability is ensured by automatic data-driven scaling services. Adding new functionalities such as voice or barcode search was added in a single two-week sprint, which previously would take at least two months. That flexibility provides the fast time-to-market that PLUS was looking for.
"The reason why we opted for a combination of headless and composable architecture has to do with the nature of our organizational demand. With more than 400 stores - largely led by entrepreneurs - we want to maintain a lot of flexibility in facilitating customer demands at a micro-store level."
"With our composable architecture, we have selected the best-of-breed applications that currently suit us. For example, if we want to focus on broader diversity in promotional communications at store level later this year, we can easily and quickly replace an application in the landscape without running the risk of instability in our core business with impact on our customer journey. With our architecture that combines headless and composable, we are one of the first food retailers in Europe to fully implemented this. Something to be proud of’’
“They understand how business and IT intersect, and they build solutions for us that address and solve business issues. For our new eCommerce platform, they guided us through the process of Build vs. Buy to select the best-fitting solutions for our digital ambitions. The people of Product League are very pragmatic and experts in technology for back-end and front-end facing applications, a perfect fit with PLUS Retail on our turbulent journey through digital transformation.”
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