Overview
Trapped in a vicious cycle of skyrocketing costs, operational bottlenecks, and sluggish response times, this UK health and beauty retail powerhouse found itself at a crossroads. Their legacy back-office systems, once cutting-edge, had become a liability – hindering growth, crippling decision-making, and eroding customer satisfaction.
But where others saw challenges, they saw an opportunity to disrupt and transform.
Discover their extraordinary digital transformation journey.
Introduction: Background
With a strategic vision and an unwavering commitment to innovation, the retailer embarked on a bold journey to modernize their core finance and HR operations. They partnered with SkillNet who possessed deep industry knowledge and a proven track record of successful transformations.
Together, they introduced a game-changing serverless architecture on AWS, revolutionizing the retailer’s back-office landscape.
Business objectives:
- Ensure high data reliability
- Minimize manual interventions
- Enhance reporting on errors and exceptions
IT objectives:
- Develop scalable integrations using modern technology
- Reduce operational costs
- Implement a pay-per-use model for services
Challenges
The retailer faced several significant challenges with their legacy systems:
- High Costs: Maintaining middleware applications and infrastructure was expensive.
- Resource Intensive: Continuous development and maintenance required a dedicated team.
- Inflexibility: Monolithic design hindered adaptability to future needs.
- Operational Inefficiencies: Manual interventions were needed for scalability, failure management, and exception handling.
- Slow Response Times: Diagnosing and fixing issues took longer, leading to business disruptions.
- Limited Visibility: Difficulties in foreseeing and managing system issues.
- High Deployment Costs: Each new build incurred additional expenses.
- Constant Expenses: Ongoing costs regardless of actual system usage.
Outdated Infrastructure
High Costs | Inefficiencies | Limited Scalability
![](https://www.skillnetinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/AWS-Case-Study_Outdated_1-1024x546.png)
SkillNet Solution
SkillNet introduced a serverless architecture on AWS, transforming the retailer’s back-office operations. This new design focused on modern technology and scalable solutions, offering numerous benefits:
- Zero Downtime: The system processes over 10 million transactions per month without interruption.
- No Infrastructure Maintenance: Responsibility for infrastructure maintenance was eliminated.
- Accelerated Build Time: Application build times were reduced from months to weeks.
- Faster Error Resolution: Time required to diagnose and fix errors was significantly decreased.
- Enhanced Flexibility and Resilience: Improved system adaptability and robustness.
Modern Serverless Architecture on AWS from SkillNet
Agile | Scalable | Cost Optimized
![](https://www.skillnetinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/AWS-Case-Study_Modern_1-1024x546.png)
Results
![](https://www.skillnetinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/AWS-Case-Study-icon_1-1024x1024.png)
![](https://www.skillnetinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/AWS-Case-Study-icon_2-1024x1024.png)
![](https://www.skillnetinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/AWS-Case-Study-icon_3-1024x1024.png)
The partnership with SkillNet led to transformative results for the retailer:
- Uncompromising Reliability: Processing over 10 million transactions per month without interruption, ensuring unparalleled system availability and real-time visibility.
- Optimized Efficiency: Reducing operational overhead by 35% through a pay-per-use model and eliminating infrastructure maintenance.
- Data-Driven Agility: Ensuring precise data for better decision-making, enabling agile responses to market dynamics and customer needs.
- Future-Ready Operations: Seamlessly adapting to evolving requirements with enhanced flexibility and resilience, future-proofing operations.
As the CFO remarked during the go-live event, “I know it hasn’t been easy (it never is), but this achievement has been a long time coming. I appreciate all your efforts in making something happen that we’ve needed for the last 2, 3, 4, 5, or even 10+ years.”
The Head of Finance added, “Our team feels more productive now because they have a better set of tools at their disposal.”
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Contact our team of retail tech experts for a personalized evaluation of your serverless potential at aws@skillnetinc.com