System & Data Integration

Retail information system: a new shopping experience for a luxury brand

The Client

PwC leading company for business services

PwC is a network of professionals with global reach, committed to offering businesses numerous quality services from audit, strategic consulting to legal and tax. The goal of creating value for clients and associates drives the professionals in the PwC network to continually evolve their knowledge of local markets, adopting an agile methodology capable of enhancing numerous skills to support companies.

Over 7000 professionals in Italy

Operating in 158 countries

Go Live "Big Bang" with 100 streams among 10 new systems

PwC, on behalf of the end client (one of the most important Italian fashion brands) was responsible for the functional analysis and management of an omnichannel digital transformation project. Boomi was identified as an ideal technological solution for the digitization of the end client's store operational processes. PWC therefore was looking for a vendor specializing on iPaaS Boomi, capable of carrying out a project of high technological complexity in a challenging timeframe. In this context Mind-Mercatis was identified as a company highly qualified on the topic of systems integration and in particular on Boomi.

The challenge

The complexity of the systems and processes to be integrated was one of the main challenging elements, especially with the limited time available and when related to the nature of the services , which, being in real-time, imposed stringent downtime on a high number of application streams:

Numerous ways of integration

Stringent performance requirements for realtime streams retrieved from stores (checkout or clienteling app)

Reliable data synchronization between systems to ensure high data quality

The project

In the collaboration, which began in October 2018, Mind-Mercatis was in charge of the analysis and development phase, integration testing and UAT, working to ensure:

data integrity;
flow control;
Reducing the complexity of integrating heterogeneous systems, some of which pertain to custom solutions;
error management with unified logic and integrated with customer monitoring systems.

Boomi has proven to be a particularly fast low-code platform. In fact, Boomi offers centralized cloud development environment and provides both cloud and on premise monitoring. The Boomi platform also enables highly customizable solutions thanks to numerous native connectors to multiple systems (ex. Salesforce, sap) and technologies (DB, HTTP, FTP, SFTP).

PwC has consistently worked with Mind-Mercatis for functional analysis and to ensure that very challenging deadlines are met.

The strategy

Given the complex and articulated nature of the project, it was divided into several waves: in each wave the application flows were categorized by area(Finance, Store, E-commerce). The analysis was conducted by optimizing the activity by groups of flows to ensure maximum efficiency.

By adopting Boomi , we integrated 10 new systems without the need to modify them. We simplified interfaces and made data exchange monitoring between all Retail systems consistent, including enterprise-wide standard error handling. We made the level of data updates in the platforms measurable and transparent. The Mind-Mercatis methodology reduced development time, giving greater agility to the original plan and providing the Client with operational standards, which were then shared with other vendors. Integrations involved checkout software, ERP, Salesforce, and clienteling apps. These systems were integrated via the Boomi Atomsphere platform through real time and batch integrations.

The results

The 'introduction of a scalable technology solution has made it easy to replicate flows, in this specific case the end customer can easily manage the addition of new stores and new countries. The architecture, with molecule, ensures optimal performance and scalability, both on batch and real-time processes . With Boomi, you maximize 'efficiency thanks to a centralized dashboard that allows greater autonomy and control over analyzing and monitoring the performance of your stores and cost savings on the application management part as well.

The main achievements of Mind-Mercatis' deep technological knowledge:

Reduction in development time to one-third

Centralization of application flow monitoring and control

Automatic integration with the ticketing system used by the fashion brand

Future developments:

After the collaboration in which PWC orchestrated the project for the fashion brand with technological support from Mind-Mercatis, Boomi's potential was then exploited by the end client in an increasingly extensive way. Indeed, in the future, there are plans to extend Boomi to new systems and refactoring of the e-commerce system