OMS integration for increased speed, consistency, and quality

• Client profile: electronics retail company 
• Project: OMS integration 

As a leading electronics retailer, the company has more than 1000 stores in 15 countries. These countries have different laws and regulations that require a further customisation of the system to make it compatible with the legal standards. Also, another challenge was the diversity of platforms (one for each country). Some of these platforms contained 80% of the solutions needed, while others had none. 

In this case, undergoing the rollout of an integrated OMS, required complex tasks like infrastructure set up, initial data load, and data migration, all while making sure that the company's processes were not affected from a business point of view. 

• Different platforms for each country: these differences made the rollout execution difficult and prone to error. 
• Business, operational, and legal particularities for every country in which the company does transactions: these can differ in the actual FSP integration, fiscal documents that need to be provided upon purchase or payment methods.  
• Difficulty to extend functionalities and prepare roll-out at the same time: the owners struggled to balance functionalities and development to further extend the OMS and to maintain a “one platform approach”. The alternative would've implied high cost on implementing and maintaining 3 different platforms with different technology stacks.  
• Create a model of development that can be done in-house starting from an already developed solution. 
• Extend business and technical functionalities: changing the existing software-as-a-service solution. 
• Reduced release time and become a release independent solution: be able to adapt to new legislation changes, business requirements. Also, this reduction would allow the business to send change into production quickly and without dependencies.  

Technologies

• MongoDB
• Java
• Git
• Spring
• Apache
• Gradle
• Kafka
• Docker

The new OMS offers the ability to customise the order execution and enable more flexible business process definitions. The platform ensures adaptable fulfilment models that can respond to each country’s particularities and legal needs. Also, implementing all the new country set-up can be done within 3 days. This enabled a decrease in time and costs, as sometimes such an implementation tool even more than a month. 

In the current state, we can have monthly independent releases on multiple countries for the OMS and for the spin-off solutions. This approach enabled us to provide hotfixes in under 2 days or faster, instead of up to a month as it was previously happening. Having fixes faster, we were able to provide better stability of the system, with positive business and customer-experience impact. 

The containerisation of the OMS, led to faster local set-up, enabling new developers to ramp-up and fix eventual problems in a timely manner. Improvements have been also seen regarding the testing duration. Testing on multiple instances is done using test automation, on scheduled time frames, thus reducing a lot of time, effort and errors. For example, regression testing was reduced from 2 weeks to 3 days. 

During our early performance-testing, our specialists timely identified load problems which allowed the development team to fix them timely and proactively. This endeavour allowed the company to have the most successful Black Friday’s in 3 consecutive years. By means of testing and continuous development, we made the platform to increase from 140 orders processed/sec to a top of 400 orders/sec without any problems.  

The aggregated order capability collects orders from multiple order capture channels (online, call center and store) and provides a single source of order status information across these channels. This led to an increase in sales during Black Friday of an average of 194% from the previous year.  

The financial gain for our partner comes from the design of the new ordering platform. Different from the previous solution that generated a cost per transaction, the new OMS has no such costs. While costs do exist with the new platform, these are not related to the number of orders. As the company increased the initial to up to 32.000 orders per day with a peak of 1.000.000 orders, this meant a significant reduction of costs.