The Challenge
The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the retail sector. Consumers who would have ordinarily visited brick-and-mortar stores began shopping online in droves.
For one large Irish retail chain, this shift created unprecedented strain on e-commerce operations. Siloed legacy systems made it difficult to get a clear view of inventory or the status of online orders. Meanwhile, the disconnected processes for physical stores and e-commerce operations meant managing its stock in separate warehouses.
The rapid change in demand affected customer service and efficiency. Orders were previously shipped with a two-day delivery promise. But turnaround time skyrocketed during the pandemic, with orders taking weeks to reach customers. As its 2021 peak season approached, the retailer needed to unify and streamline its technology and operations to address these challenges.
Our Objective
The retailer sought the latest and best industry practices to extend its in-house capabilities and modernise its legacy technology. The company engaged Deloitte to lead the project with three main goals:
- Build a state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure and develop data analytics capabilities.
- Gain a single, real-time view of stock and a stock availability data service.
- Improve customer experience with optimised delivery and collection options.
Solution
The retailer was ready to modernise its siloed systems and legacy technology. It selected Deloitte to bring multi-disciplinary, end-to-end capabilities to the project- including retail and textile subject matter expertise-that would help meet the growing e-commerce demand.
Creating the Solution
The Deloitte team incorporated the most up- to-date tools and client selected technologies to define, build, and implement a unified e-commerce system. This was delivered via a Microsoft Azure based architecture and used tools such as Microsoft Azure Data Factory, Azure SQL, Data Lake Gen2, and Power BI to provide:
- Increased agility and flexibility: A cloud- based environment allowed the retailer to stage, integrate, and publish data from a variety of internal and third-party data sources and systems.
- Comprehensive visibility: With a single- view-of-stock dataset, the client gained comprehensive visibility of its stock—in stores, the online warehouse, the store’s warehouse, and in transit between warehouses and stores. In addition, a single-view-of-orders dataset was integrated and enabled by parcel tracking for both click-and-collect and delivery orders.
- Real-time insights and data-informed decisions: Aggregated information from disparate sources enabled dashboards, with custom head office and store views, to support the proactive management of stock and orders.
- Improved efficiency: The single-view-of- orders dataset was integrated with a new handheld scanning device system. This created huge efficiencies in how click-and- collect orders were receipted and collected by customers.
By modernising its technology and processes, the retailer gained real-time visibility into all levels of detail across stock and orders - supporting quick, informed decision-making and streamlining order fulfilment for online customers.
Process
The Deloitte team was responsible for developing the end-to-end solution architecture through a collaborative approach with our client. Daily standups with client leads for each of the key workstreams enabled the team to remain responsive and proactive as the client’s needs changed throughout the year-long engagement.
In addition, the Deloitte team defined the data models that supported the solution, built the pipelines to populate the data models, and developed detailed dashboards that presented stock and order data to key business users. Finally, they supported the business process optimisation work that ensured the client made the best use of its new capability.
Defining the Workstream
From a technology perspective, the project focused on three key workstreams:
- Enabling the online trading of all stock across the client’s network by building a single, real-time view and a stock availability data service to improve visibility, increase sales, and take pressure off the e-commerce warehouse.
- Enhancing customer order fulfillment capabilities to provide optimised delivery and collection options for customer orders and improve the customer experience.
- Setting up the cloud infrastructure to support the proposed technology solutions and data analytics capability.
