Our client is the world's largest furniture retailer and a multinational conglomerate with over 400 outlets in more than 50 countries. Emphasizing the needs of their customers, they offer affordable, well-designed and ready-to-assemble furniture while minimizing shipping costs and optimizing furniture efficiency. By focusing on the needs of their social duty, the client concentrates on using as many recyclable and renewable materials as possible. They also manage the Foundation program, which is projected globally to become carbon neutral by 2030.
The Challenge
Struggling with integration in automation and self-service
- The current style of working focuses on working in silos with a lack of end-to-end ownership and a traditional way of addressing the requests that are leading to less customer satisfaction
- The business is suffering because it cannot realize its opportunities because of inefficiencies, a lack of visibility on benefits and strategies that need to be put in place for working towards automation
- The absence of relatable benchmarks and a systematic integration between inventory and artifacts within the platform is a roadblock to delivering on consumers' expectations
- Working towards increasing reliability in a provider/consumer model is an integral part of the job, but needing more visibility creates problems for committing to the consumer and catering to zero downtime with strategic initiatives
- Having a cumbersome process to identify Known Error Database (KEDB) related to incidents or missing qualitative data to the root cause for critical Incidents
The objective
Creating an effortless online user journey
The client has the Oracle Integration Platform (OIP), which constitutes the heart of the digital operation and is critical for running daily business, but this doesn't remain the essence of the initiative but to improve the working of the business continuously.
- We are providing robust Platform Engineering and Operations to increase the efficiency of the business
- We are establishing integration standards, governance and support for Oracle Fusion Middleware products such as Oracle Service Bus (OSB) and Oracle SOA Suite
- Through automation and self-service, faster, easier and higher-quality integrations can be enabled, ultimately improving delivery efficiency, customer relations and cost-effectiveness
The Solution
Ease accessibility to the customer journey
- Implemented a comprehensive strategy to enhance team capabilities and stakeholder engagement via SRE training and educational sessions.
- Shifted the Target Operating Model to adopt a Platform as a Product construct.
- Established the engineering baseline with a strategic approach, integrating initiatives like Platform as Code, Platform LCM Automation (minor and major) and self-service enablement for platform consumers.
- Empowered effective decision-making, transparency and improved incident resolution through ITSM integration. A comprehensive platform monitoring system, cataloging services and dependencies, combined with automated data checks and real-time reporting.
- Incorporated the providers' mindset in the team, we established internal squads focused on SLI/SLOs, DR testing and custom code compliance. This ensured alignment with consumer needs and efficient data integration into the CI/CD pipeline.
- Early detection helped include automation and "shift left" principles and involved consumers from the start of significant changes. Experimentation further reduced risk and improved lead time for mitigation.
- SRE practices (incident reviews, knowledge management, stakeholder collaboration) tackled complex issues, closed knowledge gaps and streamlined alert resolution with more innovative automation.
The Impact
Revolutionizing the platform experience
- Platform Consumer Satisfaction scored 4.4 out of 5 and team happiness scored 4.6 out of 5.
- We have reduced 360 hours of toil every quarter, improving engineering and security practices. Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) was reduced by 30% and log storage expenses by 58%.
- We have maintained 99.99% platform availability and successfully managed 4 major and 2 minor lifecycle transitions with minimal impact on the business.
