client context

A leading luxury department store chain based in the Pacific Northwest was at the forefront of retail move to the web.  Initially their website was designed to drive customers to their physical stores; however, the focus later shifted to online sales. Over the course of 10 years, online sales rose to parity with those from brick and mortar - and would soon overtake the physical stores as the primary revenue source. ​

business challenge

The data which is at the heart of the client’s platform comes from a variety of sources on a daily basis.  While they have built a unique job management application which acquires, scrubs and moves this data, the application has internal inconsistencies in form and function.

As a result, there is fragility - and the application often fails at basic tasks. The application is hosted internally on aging hardware, which is currently struggling with the day to day workload​​

THE Broadpoint solution

After a detailed analysis of the existing platform and data sources, the BroadPoint team recommended a move from on-premises to Azure. Beginning with the front end, we migrated the client to a content delivery system which enabled releases of customer-facing changes in hours, rather than weeks. Using proven methodologies, the BroadPoint team identified and demonstrated the logical seams in the platform – and enabled “run-ahead” teams tasked with deconstructing the current platform into smaller, discrete units aligned with business areas - such as Customer, Product, Inventory, Order and Payment. Because the mobile application platform was tightly coupled with the web platform, this deconstruction allowed the client to add functionality to both platforms quickly and independently.

The client had previously attempted to become agile by overlaying 2-3-week development cycles on what was still essentially a waterfall process.  The BroadPoint team helped the client become truly agile across the spectrum of their people, processes and technology. This was achieved through careful reorganization, educating people to effect community and culture changes, and clearly defined processes and procedures – which included definition of prioritizing criteria to address feature intake and more.   ​

Along the way, the client was able to modernize their teams and platform. Random access to resources gave way to structured microservices, checks and balances were put in place to make the platform more secure both internally and externally, and a master data management solution was created.  The cross-channel integration, enabled by the master data management solution, also led to a better understanding of the customer interactions across the customer life cycle, and not just isolated pockets like the web, mobile and store.  These changes took a 4-6-month release cadence to a bi-weekly cadence.  ​ ​