OZ Assembles a Certified IT Dream Team to Revolutionize the Legacy System of a Prominent Furniture Retailer

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The Catalyst

A major furniture retailer with over two billion dollars in revenue and a national presence—both in the online and brick and mortar spheres—faced multiple systemic challenges which left it mired in a cycle of ad hoc manual troubleshooting that hamstrung its customer service representatives, delayed fulfillment challenges detecting fraud, and frustrated both existing and potential customers.

The Challenge

As growth outpaced legacy system capabilities, a series of issues arose:

  • Orders placed via the retailer’s e-commerce front-end did not appear in its legacy back-end ordering system.
  • Because systems integrations were monolithic in nature and not extendable, each new upgrade was time-intensive, costly, and required starting from scratch.
  • Without a reliable mechanism to identify fraudulent orders in its online system, the retailer suffered revenue loss.

Resolution

To help the client achieve actionable clarity, the OZ team leveraged not only a quarter century of enterprise integration experience and knowledge but also, via OZ Talent Studio, provided a team of certified IT professionals from our carefully curated and screened pool of highly skilled collaborators with extensive expertise in cutting-edge technologies.

  • A seasoned project manager, to provide both high-level and granular guidance.
  • An integrations architect to design and develop microservice architecture.
  • Developers to build out the blueprint from the project manager and integrations architect.
  • QA engineers to test and finetune software throughout.
  • Business analysts to ensure technology is serving and empowering the larger business vision.

After conducting a collaborative audit of needs and opportunities—as well as recruiting the above team—OZ undertook a multilevel, interwoven campaign to revamp and revolutionize the retailer’s systems and processes.

First, OZ implemented a microservices architecture using REST APIs. Each API was atomic in nature and worked in conjunction with other APIs to fulfill specific and overarching business goals.

This new API-led architecture is not only extendable, discoverable, secure, and scalable, but increases IT capacity to deliver at a faster pace because each new project extended existing API solutions to deliver new solutions.

Further, OZ deployed a set of robust APIs to integrate e-commerce front- and back-end legacy order processing systems, including an intelligent error handling and retry mechanism to eliminate lost orders. This new architecture guarantees delivery between systems. In fact, even if the back end is unavailable for hours orders will not be dropped or misplaced but instead efficiently processed as soon as the system is available again.

Finally, OZ integrated the existing orders API into a new SaaS system that supercharged the retailer’s fraud detection mechanism, greatly mitigated risk, and increased revenue.

Enhancements

The benefits of the Talent Studio experience to the client include…

  • A new level of CX. Thanks to the new architecture and intelligent error handling, delivery from the front-end e-commerce site to the back-end processing system became efficient, reliable, and a boon to customer service representatives who can now focus on delivering better CX rather than fielding constant complaints and chasing down individual orders.

    Sales subsequently increased and the newly designed system proved capable of handling the Black Friday and Cyber Monday rushes when orders worth millions of dollars were processed by these APIs in a matter of hours. Scheduled deliveries are now also faster and more accurate.

  • Increased IT delivery capacity. By introducing the microservices architecture, the completion time for each new project has been considerably reduced, opening a path to accelerated digital transformation.
  • Catering to legitimate customers. With integration into a SaaS Fraud detection system, orders were filtered with high accuracy of fraud detection, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty as well as revenue.

Conclusion

By placing the right IT professionals for the right job at the right cost, OZ scaled the client’s technical resources quickly and efficiently, aligning the retailer’s aspirations and needs with cost-effective, certified experts, collaborative development leadership, and end-to-end support.

The result? 

An already successful company empowered to scale its revenue, reputation, and greatness to even more impressive heights.