Retail
Application Development
We selected Trigent because of their experience with development of web applications, execution of mission-critical projects and the professionalism exhibited by their team. One of the key things Trigent delivered was the upgrade of our PO Transmission software. It’s absolutely been running like a charm and it transmitted every single one of our orders.
— Co-Founder, A leading online retailer of bags and travel accessories
About the Client
The client is the world’s leading online retailer of bags and travel accessories. Through its website, the company offers its customers a selection of over 1M products across 550 top brands, including Michael Kors, JanSport, Nike, Tumi, Vera Bradley, The North Face, and Samsonite. Launched in 1999, the client platform is built to offer a reliable, safe, and enjoyable customer-centric online shopping experience.
Business Needs
The organization aspired to grow its business by 15% annually by rapidly adding new online and web experiences. To support and sustain this high level of growth, it was imperative for the company to leverage its technology investments and accumulated knowledge efficiently and cost-effectively.
Business Challenge
With the growth in business and increased product volume, updating product information from 500+ merchandisers was complex, laborious, time-consuming, and error-prone due to the manual processes involved. They needed a faster, automated, and efficient way to upload, manage and maintain the vast amount of product information. Additionally, the client looked to leverage and extend its existing technology foundation for more reliable and predictable business operations. However, technologically transforming their existing system demanded a consolidation of their existing applications and onboarding additional resources.
Trigent Solution
To grow its business exponentially, the client had to strengthen the systems and processes supporting its website, decrease the time to market for site applications, and ensure effective knowledge management. The client decided to invest in an Offshore Development Center (ODC) and partnered with Trigent to ensure minimal disruption to its existing business teams.
Trigent’s ODC team skills were aligned with the client’s business requirements as a seamless extension. The ODC capacity ramped up and down with the evolution of the project.
Providing an intuitive tool to enhance the supply chain
At the ODC, Trigent assembled a team of technical experts, retail domain specialists, solution architects, and business analysts. They undertook an intense knowledge transfer session to understand the client’s current systems, data flows, processes, software architecture, and technical stack.
Leveraging its domain experience and technical expertise in application development, the team developed a solution for merchandisers and vendors to update inventory details into the Core Retail Platform. An intuitive web interface allowed registered vendors to upload bulk data across multiple product categories and SKUs simultaneously onto the client’s systems. Predefined data structures and content formats ensured 100% accuracy of product information, zero duplication, and fast updates that reduced operational expenses significantly. Vendors were able to upload images 4x faster.
The solution was built on the Microsoft .NET platform. The team also provided a secured API framework, leveraging OLE DB with a set of interfaces to extract large volumes of data from Microsoft excel. Moreover, the API framework was further integrated with QRS for retrieving Universal Product Codes(UPC). Additionally, NUnit was leveraged to test the application code developed by the ODC.
Expansion of the project scope in the following year
The company commissioned the migration of some applications from the legacy Inprise application server to the Wildfly (formerly known as JBoss). For ease of maintenance, all the product data and information were moved to a single database. Trigent provided technical expertise in converting the SQL server database to Oracle. Essential apps like Purchase Order Transmission were rewritten from Java to .NET with Oracle DB interfaces. Automated QTP (quick test professional) scripts were developed to validate the UI changes.
Client Benefits:
The ODC customized to the client’s business needs, enabled them to:
- Reduce manual interventions and help the merchandising managers bring new franchises to market swiftly
- Streamline the workflow process and improve image upload efficiency by 4x
- Improve the application performance by over 3x
- Reduce errors and mismatches in product data by 99.9%
- Complement the clients Engineering team, allowing them to expedite new feature development
Technology Stack:
