An e-Commerce Leader

Revamps their IT Tools and Infrastructure with Pentalog

Client location Hanover, Germany

Business area Retail

Product e-Commerce

Delivery center Iasi, Romania

Project type Development

About the client

Our client is an e-Commerce leader with shops all over the world. They are one of the largest retailers in Europe and they sell a large variety of products.

JAVA
Spring

The challenge

When a company wants to innovate first they need to come up with a plan and then form a team to implement it. One of our clients, a large E-commerce business, knew what changes they wanted to make to their IT framework, all they needed was an expert team to design and implement the changes. They decided to form a long-term relationship with Pentalog that would span over a number of years as well as a number of different projects.

Our client wanted to create and update a number of different IT tools to support their business. However, they didn’t have the developers they needed in-house to take on the projects that they had in mind. Overall, our client wanted to revamp some of their internal management tools and more significantly they wanted to create a new structure for their online stores.

The goal of the e-commerce project was to create a single product catalog that would function for all of our client’s online stores, making maintenance and backend operations easier and more efficient. What was especially challenging about this project was learning about and using Hybris to complete the new single product catalog feature.

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The solution

Although the client faced numerous IT challenges, they were able to address them all with one single IT outsourcing solution. They decided to team up with Pentalog developers in Romania in order to benefit from a nearshore partnership.

Phase One

The collaboration started in 2014 when three of Pentalog’s Java developers were given the task of performing maintenance on and making improvements to an internal warehouse management tool. By the end of the year the improvements were finished and the team was ramped down to just one developer who continued maintenance for a few months until the project was entirely completed. This small project served as the prologue to a long partnership between Pentalog and this client.

Phase Two

Later in 2015 a new team of Pentalog developers in Iasi began the more challenging project of creating a single product catalogue feature for the client’s e-commerce stores. It was decided that Hybris would be used to develop this solution, however this would entail a lengthy R&D period as Hybris has a steep learning curve and Pentalog’s developers had to take time to find the best way to design and implement the new feature.

This project began with 5 Pentalog developers who used Kanban techniques and self-learning to complete the project. Before work on the single catalogue feature could begin, the developers had to migrate our client’s existing solution from Hybris 5.0 to Hybris 5.7. The team then started coding the single product catalog feature, but before the project was finished the team was ramped down to only two devs who had to finish developing this feature and then deploy it by themselves. At the same time this two person team took over a project to create a single article price tool that could compare our client’s prices to those of their competitors and then calculate the best new price to set for a specific product. On top of all of this the two man team was responsible for monitoring the client’s e-commerce stores, making sure they stayed up and running during business hours.

Phase Three

In parallel to Pentalog’s Hybris team, a second two man team operated for a short amount of time on a business partner tool that was completed in 4 months. This is an internal tool that helps our client manage communication and collaboration with their various partners. After this short project was finished, these two devs started working on the single article price tool. However, our client decided to ramp down the team again so these two devs left the project and handed the development of the single article price tool over to the original two man team, who became responsible for completing all of the tasks described above.

The results

During three years of collaboration Pentalog was able to revamp the client’s warehouse management tool, migrate their solution from Hybris 5.0 to Hybris 5.7, build a single catalog feature using Hybris starting from R&D to deployment, create a new business partner tool, and finally implement a comparison price manager feature to compliment the e-commerce upgrade. Most of this work was done by just a two person team using Scrum and Kanban methodologies to organize their work.

All of this effort resulted in tools that increased our client’s efficiency in managing warehousing, their business partners, their numerous e-commerce stores, and even their pricing. They have seen positive changes in their business numbers as well. They were continually pleased with the performance of our developers, rating them 5/5 at the end of each sprint (except for one 4/5 rating).

This is still an ongoing collaboration, Pentalog’s two person development team is still performing maintenance and there are new features planned in the backlog. We will continue working with this client into the future to support their IT infrastructure as they focus on developing their business.

Cristian Neghina
Customer Success Manager

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