Premium eyewear maker doubles the speed of change deployment

Brief

SkillNet enables the client to double the speed of technology deployment cycle through automation and the adoption of DevOps processes.

About the client

The client is a leader in the design, manufacture, and distribution of fashion, luxury, and sports eyewear. The Group’s global wholesale distribution network covers more than 150 countries across five continents and is complemented by an extensive retail network of approximately 9,200 stores mostly located in North America, Latin America, and the Asia Pacific. They also have a strong online presence.

Challenge

As a brand leader, the client values customer experience highly. Their drivers for change are “need for higher customer responsiveness” as well as higher “business agility”. Both these require quick deployment of changes to technology.

The client’s team handles multiple new releases every year. With a complex landscape of products and solutions, the deployment process was laborious for even small updates and enhancements. Technology release cycles were weighed down by a prolonged release process that was manual, prone to rework, and involving physical upgrade of store POS systems. This operational inefficiency resulted in increased costs and lower business agility.

Solution | Improving efficiencies in POS solution management with DevOps and Agile

The SkillNet team assessed the end-to-end deployment process. Drawing on the team’s deep retail systems expertise, SkillNet recommended a revised efficient approach by adapting DevOps and agile for POS solution management in a phased manner.

The first phase was the automation of the quality control process for build testing. SkillNet created automated test scripts to perform the regression of point of sale application. The automation changes which were introduced were independent of the changes being made on the POS application. This not only gave the client team more control but they were able to consider newer technology adaptations for expanded functionality.

Benefits | Improving customer responsiveness and business agility

With automation and adoption of DevOps processes, the client has been able to

• Add functionality to the POS systems to ensure quick response to customer demands without dependency on external partners. This was not only more efficient but also reduced costs
• Two-fold increase in the speed of deployment (from 10 days per release to 5 days) by automating test scripts
• Decrease in costs due to the reduced rework