Laura Ashley has been around since the 1950’s. They have since grown to become an international retail chain renowned for its quintessentially English products. The company is now owned by an international company, yet it remains true to its heritage.
The Challenge
Like many retailers they were looking to improve the integration between their supply and delivery chain while improving overall customer experience. The plan to achieve this involved replacing the legacy order management system written in COBOL / Powerhouse, replace a substantial number of point to point integrations with an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and provide a single view of customer orders which was a huge problem due to customer service agents needing to access up to eleven separate systems.
The company embarked on a project to implement Oracle’s SOA Suite platform and commissioned an offshore systems integrator to facilitate this. Unfortunately, this didn’t transpire to be the smooth transition they had been promised. The new environment was functional, but they were experiencing inherent recurring issues that the incumbent supplier appeared unable to resolve despite the presence of a permanent onsite resource. The company were becoming increasingly concerned with the level of service received from their supplier and the performance of their newly implemented solution.
With a number of critical projects in the pipeline such as replacing the POS system and increasing concerns regarding their offshore partner, Integrella was approached with a view to understanding how we could assist them overcome these challenges.
The Solution
Following an initial workshop, Integrella suggested their approach to gaining more insight to these problems: a comprehensive review of the solution and this highlighted a plethora of issues which were documented in a detailed report that included short, medium and long term remediation options designed to improve and stabilise the platform.
They were impressed with the problems and solutions we identified, and this provided them with the confidence to give their existing partner notice and appoint Integrella as their new outsource Oracle SOA partner. In addition they took out a Long Term Support (LTS) package which ensures their integration environment is supported 24/7.
The partnership has continued to grow, and more recently Integrella has also assumed full responsibility for the support/development of their Oracle ADF / Webcenter environment which is another critical part of the company’s front end to its customers.
The Benefits
- Vastly improved performance from Oracle SOA and ADF/Webcenter Platforms
- Increased efficiency of customer service environment with less time spent per call and happier customers
- Documented Governance process following Oracle best practice
- Significantly reduced downtime of SOA/ADF/Webcenter environments
- Reduced number of support requests / tickets
- Full ITIL backed SLA based support service with pro-active monitoring
- Reduced cost of integration due to re-architecting of SOA environment to accommodate re-use of services.
About Integrella
Integrella is a specialist IT services company with extensive experience across UK sectors. Our services include consulting, development, delivery, support and resourcing. We deliver our solutions by partnering with top vendors in the industry.
The pressure is on every organisation to be more connected, more convenient, more compelling and more social. These needs drive digital transformation. Integrella can help you realise the potential in what you already have – and set you on the right digital track.