Too Many Systems Collected During Growth: A Case Study

Over a Canadian retailer’s 90-year history, they had built and inherited through acquisitions many one-off systems. The problems caused by the variety of disparate systems and data sources became larger and larger as the company grew and expanded. Now there is a need to consolidate all these systems and implement an agile system that can grow with the company. An additional problem with consolidation was the different use cases across the company both at the corporate and retail level. Several departments needed access to real-time information from a centralized access point to enable enhanced collaboration across geographies, business units, stores, distribution centers and corporate departments. The brand needed a solution that could help them achieve real-time collaboration while retaining brand identities from a single, centralized access point.

 

What We Did

To build a solution that met a Canadian retailer’s needs, Veriday built the platform using a Liferay portal.

Why Liferay?

With a modern architecture that’s deployable to the cloud, with its flexibility and agility to evolve with new technology and future growth, Liferay is the best foundation to build their required solution. The Liferay portal is accessible from any device, offers rich personalization, a Secure Single Sign-On (SSO), and is built with a history of excellent open-source fundamentals, providing a decade’s worth of innovation from thousands of developers with the flexibility to tailor the platform to meet development needs.

The portal solution focused on Supply Chain solutions with visibility into the entire flow of the supply chain. The portal allows for self-service solutions and real-time information, with detailed visibility into all orders, history, and status. This allows stores to be able to allocate and plan resources to receive new merchandise. The solution has achieved excellent adoption rates, with 90% of the retail stores using the platform on a day-to-day basis.

Results

The new portal solution that was built for the Canadian retailer was successful at solving the different problems faced by both the retail and corporate sides of the business. Some of the results include:

• Increased agility for their in-house IT delivery team, who are now able to deliver new features quickly.
• Increased internal satisfaction, by providing employees with the tools they need to do their job more effectively.
• Made data more accessible, from any device, anytime.
• Improved long-term value for the Canadian retailer’s portal technology, by providing a scalable foundation that can evolve and grow with them.

All of these results line up with the combined goals for their portal solution, improving overall productivity. We know that the portal solution we built will help one of Canada’s most iconic retail brand continue to grow today, and in the future.