One of the leading consumer electronics, home office products, entertainment software, and related services giant in America. It is well known for high-level of customer service, low prices, and selection of brand-name consumer electronics, appliances, home computer equipment, and software. The Company’s domestic segment operated 687 Superstores and nine outlet stores in 158 United States media markets. In the international market, the company conducted business
through 775 retail stores and dealer outlets; this consisted of 502 Company-owned stores and 273 dealer outlets.
Business Challenges:
This company has an online store front that provides a host of features like detailed product information, product reviews, and product comparisons besides enabling the user to buy online. This online store was based on the obsolete technology that did not cater to the growing customer needs. They need to give their site a customer centric design was restricted by the inability of existing product to manage growing business needs. They needed to upgrade
to next generation, highly scaleable version that would provide an unsurpassed shopping experience to its customers. It is nearly a decade old product and written in C++, CORBA, and JavaScript with some part of code in Java. Some major business challenges faced by them included:
• Provide an unsurpassed online shopping experience by giving a customer-focused
design to the site
• Exploit the marketing value of the site through strong branding, best-in-class
knowledge content, a compelling multi-channel story, and a design that optimizes
all marketing channels
• Position the site for an expanded assortment of products, alternative store fronts,
greater variety in content, and continued growth in functionality
• Improve ability to meet business objectives in an agile, predictable, and cost-effective
manner
• Equip merchants with a complete set of tools to drive conversion, volume, average
ticket size, and gross margins
Technology Challenges:
• The decade old architecture was not flexible enough to incorporate the changing
business requirements.
• JavaScript has been the primary implementation language for presentation,
application, and business logic. While this has served well, inefficiencies inherent in
the language overly burdens CPU resources and often results in the need to re implement
some process intensive code segments.
• Due to the JavaScript based architecture, certain limitations exist
Tight coupling of presentation layer with the underlying content
Page scripts contain the logic for page elements and layout
Page scripts control the content display behavior for user types
• Little to no hands-on control over the site presentation creates a dependency on IT
for presentation layer updates or changes.
• The code base of the product is mix of languages. These disparities imposed strict
resource requirements.
Solution Provided:
• Perform gap analysis and design the newly architected site
• Develop new architecture and define usage of components of existing product where
ever possible
• Iterative and incremental development
• Use of new front-end technology and MVC architecture to isolate presentation layer
from the middleware, which contains the business logic
• Revise product taxonomy and nomenclature based on consumer research and input
from R/GA and Endeca
• Integrate with Legacy AS/400 systems for real-time inventory information across
the stores to enable functionality like buy online and pick up from any store
The Company witnessed some major benefits that include:
• The new architecture was highly performing, scalable and flexible.
• Realize benefits of Unified J2EE environment
• Easily divided along skill set lines (presentation, middleware, data layer), allowing
each member of the development team to focus on their area of expertise
• Provide a desired level of administrative capabilities to business users with minimal
IT intervention and without the need to go through development cycles. For
example, the client-specific pricing rules can be implemented by the client’s
business team.
• The new architecture supported incremental development as different iterations of
business functional tracks.
• The new architecture aligned with the latest technologies and supported multilingual
approach.
• Dual shore development and sustenance model reduced the overall cost.
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