The Client
The client is widely recognized as the UK’s leading provider of business solutions in the apparel marketplace. Their expertise in clothing, footwear and accessories is helping them deliver multi-channel ERP business solutions to the apparel industry since 1991. With 25 years of rich experience, they aim at providing a full range of services to its end customers and helping them drive growth from local to global and single to multi-channel.
The Challenges
Being the leader in the apparel solutions marketplace, the client desired to offer its end-customers with a solution that offers a single view of the product, gives enterprise inventory visibility, in-store mobility, personalized engagement and seamless channel commerce for the end-consumers.
The retail IT landscape comprises of different systems like stores, warehouses, remote workers, head office data, that needed to be internally and externally integrated together in a way they can communicate and interact smoothly.
The system with the growing business demanded up-gradation to Progress OpenEdge 11.6 Suite and integration with external applications such as Financial Accounting Software, Warehouse Management Software, and EPOS Tills; hence resulting in improved customer experience.
In addition, the application required to be highly secure and protected from the risks of malicious attacks that can cause irreparable damage to the business. Hence, it was key for the solution to be functionally and technically mature to meet the business demands while being agile, scalable, highly protected and customizable to meet the customer needs.
The Objective
The Order Management software is the core of the Client’s enterprise, which aims at delivering effective process management across different functions like sales, purchase and stock control. With the rapid business growth, the client was required to meet the specific need of their customers’ business and provide them with a robust and at the same time a secure and flexible solution. The application was required to protect the end customers and businesses by meeting information security standards. Hence, it was desired the system to be highly flexible and protected to meet the dynamic needs of the end-customer’s business as well as the apparel marketplace.
The Solution
JK Tech during its 5-years engagement has been focused to offer a competitive product for leading companies in the apparel marketplace in the UK, helping them to manage the retail life cycle more seamlessly.
JK Tech worked on every aspect of the application, providing 100% application coverage. The application software was developed using Progress OpenEdge 11.6 Suite on ADM2-like architecture followed by tight integration with other external applications like Financial Accounting Software, Warehouse Management Software and EPOS Tills system.
Retail Order Management Integration Architecture:
The integration landscape included the following key aspects:
- Integration Channels: The self-learning end-consumers are demanding support and seamless experience across channels Kiosks, POS registers, web, purchases, etc.
- Channel Integration Layer: This layer acts as the façade between the end-consumers and the enterprise business service layer to manage complexities related to disruptive technology, security, authorization and governance aspects.
- Enterprise Business Service Layer: The layer is vital to create business services that can be consumed by any channel and add on any new feature as required by the business can be invoked here.
- Common Business Applications including Third-party: This layer acts as a consolidation layer wherein all back-end processes and applications i.e. both core and customer-facing, were harmonized.
- Business Process Layer: This layer allows the stateful business process needs to be addressed by externalizing a separate layer in the architecture hence, enabling them to change according to the market conditions.
The application with the OpenEdge 11.6 platform made the solution comprehensive connected retail architecture, where each of the various middleware aspects is responsible for performing a specific function in that connected retail architecture.
In addition to that, the solution also solved one of the most important aspects, that is security, by using the Transport Layer Security, which is a successor to Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and provides end-to-end communications security over the network.
The Benefits
- The application developed using Progress OpenEdge on ADM2-like architecture and seamlessly integrating different modules helped in simplifying the data analysis and flexible reporting, resulting in smooth work of order entry and reporting. Thus, it helped in operational expenses by 15-30%.
- The client was now able to provide better services to its customers as the updated application supported:
- Enterprise Inventory visibility resulted in the reduction of inventory expense.
- In-store mobility and personalized engagement resulted in higher consumer footfall.
- Seamless channel commerce resulted in a successful consumer journey and increased customer delight.
- The application helped the client’s customers with better information and decision-making process as the solution offered strategic and operational reporting insights.
- The modifications done by the team added more value to the software by making the system more smart, robust and flexible in providing support in areas like planning and forecasting, warehouse management, stock planning, minimize lost sales, business intelligence and reporting and many more.
- The application with the help of Progress OpenEdge 11.6 provides assurance to the client that their business is safe and protected by Transport layered Security. This ensures high privacy between communicating applications and application users on the internet and prohibits third-party tampering.
- Improved performance of different processes by up to 80%, saving customer costs and turnaround.
