We helped a retailer achieve productivity and efficiency gains with an InfoCepts data streaming solution that bridged data latency between legacy and modern data systems.
InfoCepts transformed a retail giant’s warehouse management operations and customer experience processes, breaking down data silos and bringing in cost savings of US $3.6 million in three years.
Handling customer satisfaction and operating processes to ensure that inventory, pricing, and shipments are well orchestrated is every retailer’s dream. At times the shackles of legacy systems are impediments to fulfilling this vision—especially with fast moving processes in the e-commerce domain.
While our customer was transitioning to modern business processes, the lack of near real-time visibility to inbound orders and shipments for every channel was a real hindrance for its US west coast warehouse supporting 1,100 employees. Delayed updates led to inaccurate availability and pricing information on the ecommerce and back-office systems. In turn, this had a cascading impact with frequent cancellations, lost sales, and unhappy customers.
At the heart of its warehouse operations sat a legacy transactional system that contributed to a daily productivity backlog of 90–120 mins for its associates. It was difficult to implement a real-time data pipeline around that packaged solution’s close-knit architecture. Further, our customer found it too expensive to adopt specialized tools having connecters to its legacy platform; in fact, the retailer perceived it wasn’t the least bit tenable and plans to sunset the legacy system in the future.
Our customer tried to identify the right-fit solution while assessing various options, including the evaluation of pricey market-leading products or building an in-house solution from scratch. However, its search process was futile and offered no assurance of success in a time-bound scenario—implying that its strategic technology roadmap was at risk.
With an out-of-box approach, InfoCepts proposed its accelerator, Real-Time Data Streamer (RTDS), to enable fast-track processes powered by real-time intelligence. It quickly optimized inventory, shipping, order fulfillment, and workforce management for our customer’s distribution center.
Beginning with a thorough assessment of our customer’s situation, the InfoCepts team quickly realized that the legacy systems had room for less than 2% additional CPU overhead. System utilization was at its peak, restricting its support of business teams on real-time analytics use cases.
We had to plan for a scalable solution that could process hundreds of million rows. Its performance would provide less than a minute latency in delivering faster insights from data warehouses and data lakes, as well as from enterprise source systems.
Fortunately, RTDS product ships with the inherent benefits of a packaged solution. Yet it’s still being customizable to set up data pipelines between a wide range of source and target systems. During its implementation phase, our customer was able to garner the benefits of real-time integration and change data capture (CDC) dependent on change journaling—implying a “zero-footprint architecture” and consuming less than 0.3% CPU load on existing systems.
At its core, RTDS is a highly resilient and fault-tolerant replication solution that guarantees zero data loss and cost optimization. Having a reliable, log-based solution from an established partner—at a quarter of the cost and in four months’ time—made perfect business sense for our customer.
At the final value delivery stages, our customer realized that the real transformation was being able to shift from nightly batch processes to all-day streaming enabling real-time campaign management, item pricing, and inventory maintenance with a few clicks.
The Customer
Our customer is an iconic retail industry leader with a global presence in the full spectrum of fashion luxury categories. These include women’s and men’s accessories, footwear, and apparel as well as wearable technology, watches, jewelry, eyewear, and a full line of fragrance products.
Industry
Retail
Business Function
Warehouse Management
Solution
Real-Time Analytics
Technologies
AWS MSK, S3, Talend, Snowflake, RDS MySQL
Solution Accelerators
Real-Time Data Streamer (RTDS)
Geography
North America
Year
2020
The InfoCepts data streamer has become a central part of our IT strategy for collecting data within the organization. It has changed our systems approach from a “once-a-day batch” mentality to “all-data-in-real-time.” RTDS fits nicely within our cloud migration plans as well, allowing us to ingest large volumes of data and develop our data lake. InfoCepts has been very responsive to our needs during implementation, going above and beyond to make sure it was thorough. I would recommend any organization that wants to change their data paradigm to look at the InfoCepts data streamer as a key component in their toolbox.”
Our entire solution, including implementation efforts and rollout, was less than one-fourth of the estimated cost of an off-the-shelf product originally identified by the customer.
The InfoCepts solution helped with productivity and efficiency gains in the distribution center operations that is estimated to be about $1.2 million in three years. RTDS also helped with other initiatives such as self-service, whereby the customer experience team was able to better manage customer satisfaction metrics.
Given its customizable nature, the RTDS solution offers a user interface to set up data pipelines across various legacy and modern data systems. This helped uncover another opportunity in our customer’s European business, delivering an even higher degree of agility and tripling overall cost savings by an additional USD $2.4 million.
Moreover, our customer realized significant collateral benefits in taxes and duties due to timely free trade zone (FTZ) reporting, plus an incremental 10% impact in ecommerce sales as the project served as a catalyst for surrounding processes. RTDS helped break down information silos that had throttled warehouse management operations, introducing technical benefits such as enterprise-grade performance, reliability, smart alerting and security, and cloud or on-premise deployment readiness.
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