Customer Background

Our customer is a leading retailer with a modern Southern Style attitude. They have over 293 stores located in 16 states across the Southern United States and a growing digital presence. Their website offers a wide assortment of national brands and private label fashion apparel.

Technology Used

The products and technologies used in this effort by our team and the customer were,

• IBM DataPower
• IBM Integration Bus
• Apigee EDGE
• Oracle RMS
• IBM MQ and MQ FTE
• IBM WSRR
• BEAM - Operational Dashboard
• IBM Quality Stage and Data Stage

The Business Challenges

With a growing digital presence, and the need to top the ultra-competitive retail industry, the customer wanted to create a much more compliant, agile and secure integration platform for their future needs. Some of the pain points that they faced were,

• Multiple Point-to-Point connections were becoming expensive to maintain and were stubborn and resistant to change leading to heavy development costs and delays
• No comprehensive protocols, data formats, (or) processing and routing supports
• Heavy file transfer use cases with need of high end-to-end monitoring capabilities
• High costs for discovery and coordination of new services and initiatives
• Difficult to consistently apply non-functional requirements such as security, data isolation and versioning
• Lack of service naming standards, standard operating procedures and best practices on service implementations
• Duplicate services leading to teams reinventing the wheel again and again

Our Solution and Support

The customer partnered with us to achieve and create,

• Architectural and Design Patterns for Product Inventory Management (PIM) Data Publish and POS Inventory consolidation
• Designed and published SOAP/REST proxies for eCommerce services and foundational services such as Get Item and Get Location
• Designed and developed API Integration using Apigee Edge for product catalog and product details
• Designed file based integrations to consumers and legacy integrations for their partners
• Designed and built applications and APIs using Apigee and IBM Integration Bus for multiple eCommerce and Integration scenarios
• Designed and developed ETL solutions for Data Movement across (or) within systems involving high data volumes and complex business rules
• Designed and developed embedded global cache that provides elastic scalable, in-memory data for storing reusable data

Customer Benefits

Strong delivery from our team combined with innovative thinking from the customer team's helped us to deliver an integration layer for the future of the customer's digital needs.

• Reusable assets that improved the quality, reduce time-to-market integrations and gave the business the agility needed
• Process Orientation which helped the customer to ensure sustainable quality improvements and also provide an easy way to implement repeatable processes ensuring cost reduction and dependence on people through Standard Operating Procedures
• Implemented PIM and Digital Commerce Platform initiatives to an Enterprise Reference Architecture Framework
• Implemented Standards and Best Practices guide the developers to reduce reinventing the wheel and also to ensure that support costs are reduced
• Bench mark timing to predict the timing to design, develop, test, deploy and support an interface for better budget and costs management
• Built Enterprise Services as references to business teams to build Enterprise Applications and APIss
• Building templates to ensure uniformity of code, there by simplifying the development and reducing support costs with higher quality