Cross-Channel Information with Unified Platforms

The Client

A multinational corporation that develops and markets footwear, apparel, equipment, accessories, and services.

The Challenge

The company's digital, retail, and wholesale partners received product information from disparate company systems, which created inconsistencies in product assortment. To compound the problem, the company uses multiple tools to manage product information that was causing digital operations overheads and limiting new product time to market. They were unable to leverage the full assortment of products for the customers' Online-2-Offline (O2O) journeys.

Their current Product Information Management (PIM) platform only allowed them to edit prices and content, and was focused solely on digital channels. Since the company has hundreds of partners and physical representation in thousands of outlets worldwide, the lack of comprehensive product management severely impacted their O2O customer journeys.

In brief, the company wanted to:

Consolidate their multiple data sources: Multiple sources for core product data created widespread inconsistencies across channels. Over the years, they added layer upon layer of management tools, but each only addressed part of the problem. The overlap between various management tools wasted time and slowed new product launches.

Achieve a unified commerce platform: Their PIM platform only allowed editing of prices and content, and focused only on digital consumption. The company needed to expand the scope of their PIM and make sure that the management of prices and content went to the right company team, both online and offline, regardless of the channel.

Streamline and secure partner integration: They had at least four different partner integrations - all using outdated security models.

Integrate their many APIs: They had more than five different APIs, each addressing different sets of products. The superabundance of APIs caused confusion, increased the probability of mistakes, and significantly contributed to slow product launches. They wanted to develop a single API to communicate the right set of product data based on marketplace and channel.

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B2C

B2B

Data Analytics

Data Governance

E-Commerce

Omnichannel

PIM

Retail

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The Solution

Our Commerce team developed a comprehensive Omnichannel Product Platform (OCPP) for the company. The new platform offers a unified product catalog and data management capability that enables cross-platform omnichannel global product experiences across digital, retail, and wholesale partners.

The new platform has four main components:

Product Ingestion: Stores API source data and performs transformations where needed. This component also confirms data against the API’s data model.

Product Catalog: Omnichannel API handles customer-ready product data. This component also spins customer experience concerns to a separate API to improve performance.

Product Management: Aggregates product data with offers and orders. This component is instrumental in creating channelized products.

Search: Funnels search inquiry requests to the Gridwall search API.

Our Commerce team also created a hub that handles partner interactions. This hub performs a secure handshake and ensures messages are routed correctly to partners. It includes batch processes that facilitate bulk data transfer. There is also a set of web and mobile APIs to aggregate product data and content threads needed for customer experience analytics.

Key aspects of our solution include:

A single comprehensive source of core data: Product data comes from a wide variety of sources in various formats. Previously, the company used several tools to bring the information together manually. Our solution automates product data ingestion and provides a unified source of comprehensive data.

Expanded management of prices and content: Previously, the company’s PIM could only manage digital channel products. The new system expands the capabilities of PIM and moves pricing and content management to the right teams with a focus on omnichannel product consumption.

Single partner data source with updated security model: Their previous system used different partner integration APIs, each with varying sets of fields and formats. Our team consolidated the existing data sources into a single unified stream with improved security.

Single API presenting the right set of products based on the marketplace and channel: Not all products are appropriate for all markets and channels. Our solution ensures that the correct set of products appears based on intelligent decisions made about the marketplace and channel.

The new system offers over 19,000 active products, used by over 1,500 data consumers, with an average of 8.7 billion API calls per week at 99.99% availability.

Business Impact

Comprehensive, unified core data source opens full market potential: With the new system, digital, retail, and wholesale customers can access the same catalog of products, opening previously unavailable marketing channels for the company. Consistent and expanded product availability through digital and wholesale partner feeds helps realize the company’s full market potential. Also, the company’s ability to leverage O2O capabilities for retail-only products on digital channels improves consumer access and increases revenue.

Lower overall operating costs and faster time-to-market: The solution integrates diverse systems and provides a high degree of automation, reducing the time and labor involved in setting up and activating new products. This lead to faster time-to-market for new products and reduces the costs of maintaining the legacy data center along with its associated technologies further, increasing the company’s ROI.

Technologies Used

Spring Boot: Tool that jump facilitates Java Spring-based application developmentConfluence: Cloud-based platform that provides Kafka managementSplunk SignalFx: AIOps platform that performs monitoring and provides analyticsJava: Popular web-oriented programming languageGradle: Multi-language software build automation toolElasticsearch: Distributed full-text search engineAmazon DynamoDB: Scalable high-performance managed NoSQL databaseAtlassian Jira: bug trackingNode.js: Asynchronous event-driven JavaScript platformAmazon Web Services: Cloud-based platform providing storage and a variety of virtualization toolsJenkins: Platform that provides CI/CD pipeline supportGraphQL: Powerful API-oriented query languageGithub: A version control system that allows for seamless collaboration without compromising the integrity of the original projectSnowflake: Cloud-based data platform that provides management and analytics toolsTesting Platforms: REST-Assured and LocalStack

Related Capabilities

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