INDUSTRY WATCH
Andreas Westendörpf , CTO , Emma – The
Sleep Company
Why did you select commercetools and Fluent Commerce as vendors for this project ?
We defined key principles and paradigms of modern , cloud-native software development that the solution candidates would need to follow to match our expectations . Given the fact that website delivery performance is critically important for e-commerce conversion rate , and having our globally-spanning , fast-paced business in mind , we wanted to make sure the solutions could fulfil our requirements with the least effort possible – especially in terms of infrastructure . Also , looking to the future , we made sure the technologies we selected would not only work for e-commerce today but could support the challenges of the new and exciting area of sleep tech and IoT in two or three years .
commercetools was chosen as the vendor for the Emma e-commerce backbone , since it is providing the industry leading headless e-commerce platform and is highly flexible and extensible , with excellent developer tooling . Fluent Commerce OMS was selected as the best fitting Order Management System .
How did AyataCommerce enable a seamless implementation during the first phase of the rollout ?
AyataCommerce supported us to get going with the Fluent Commerce Order Management System and have it swiftly set up and configured for launching our first two markets , Colombia and Chile , within just a couple of months . It is a strong partner of Fluent Commerce and was able to immediately bridge the knowledge gap that occurs when selecting a new , complex system and the need to model business operations into it .
How will you manage the rollout across other geographic locations and what is the timescale for this ?
Have , Could Have , Won ’ t Have this time ) classification method , this rigid process helps us to minimise the requirements intake and increases speed for a first working version . Through this , we quickly get to the point of running the business of a country entirely on the new platform and thus can stop developing features for it on the legacy one .
We did not plan the rollout of our business onto the new platform as a ‘ big bang ’ scenario where you flip the switch for all of the business in a single instance . Instead , we used an incremental approach , starting with as little complexity as possible , i . e ., with new and small markets , while then unlocking the more complex markets case by case . We are thrilled to have successfully rolled out the first countries and are now preparing intensively for the higher complexity class of markets .
Another key element of our approach is that we are building blueprints for each complexity class and replicate rollouts in similar countries in parallel by dedicated rollout teams . This way , we plan to finish the rollout of all markets within the ambitious timeline of 18 months , ceasing development of the old platform by mid-2022 .
What are the key benefits you ’ ve experienced ?
As we are still very early in our development of the new platform and its global rollout , the primary effects to enable business agility and running business development actively in parallel in more than 30 markets are yet to come . However , what we already see is that , due to better architectural de-coupling and separation of concerns , discussions and decisions on where to implement certain business logic are more straightforward and localised so teams can work on multiple topics concurrently .
How far has technology been a key growth enabler for your business ?
We are currently active in more than 30 countries . At Emma , we refer to three classes of business footprints in a market that has an increasing complexity .
A deep understanding of the respective business requirements is the basis of the global rollout of our re-platforming project . The details of the business in our markets are quite different , so complexity in terms of the required features also differs heavily .
At the same time , these requirements need to be challenged . Using the MoSCoW ( Must Have , Should
We are a digital company and the beating heart of our business today is e-commerce . Therefore , technology has always been part of our company and of our growth success story . At Emma , it gets even more exciting . Beyond what I consider the second degree of digitisation – meaning e-commerce and everything you need to sell or distribute your conventional products – we also do the first degree of digitisation . This is where technology becomes the product itself . At Emma , we work intensively in this ‘ sleep tech ’ domain to research , design and implement smart products that will actively improve people ’ s sleep . Stay tuned . p
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