Transforming Commerce

In our modern, rapidly evolving retail marketplace, brands face relentless pressure to innovate. Today’s digitally savvy customers demand more personalised, efficient, and seamless shopping experiences. Compounded by fierce competition, retailers are being pushed to continually find new ways to differentiate themselves and attract new customers. To meet these challenges and manage investments intelligently, many retailers are adopting a composable commerce approach.

This essentially ‘plug and play’ strategy allows a company to build its digital ecosystem incrementally, using a variety of technology components that best suit its specific needs and existing systems. Unlike traditional, monolithic systems, composable commerce offers a modular architecture, enabling retailers to pick and choose the most effective tools and services from different providers.

This flexibility is crucial for staying ahead of the innovation curve. With composable commerce, retailers can quickly adapt to market changes, integrate new technologies, and scale their operations as needed. By using these modern technologies, retailers ensure their operations stay flexible and agile, allowing them to respond almost instantly to new trends and consumer demands, ultimately keeping a competitive edge in the market.

In 2023, The Entertainer had realised the limitations with its legacy on-premises platform in light of its growth strategy – limitations including lack of support and constraints on agility and development. Recognising the need for a more dynamic and responsive system, its digital team faced the choice to either upgrade its current system or move to a totally new platform.

With wholesale re-platforming transformations often taking years to fully complete, the decision was made to consider making smaller incremental changes. Necessitated by the need to keep existing functionality, and crucially avoid disruptions during peak season – which left them a strict six-month timeframe to complete the project.

Extensive conversations were held with different systems integrators and suppliers to assess the options available in the market. It became clear that upgrading to SAP Commerce Cloud would provide the best balance of stability, functionality parity, cost savings and agility.

SAP Commerce offered The Entertainer minimal limitations and the flexibility to develop custom solutions, whilst also being a familiar platform. While some platforms initially appeared less expensive, they lacked the desired feature richness, and introducing multiple platforms simultaneously was not considered best for stability.

KPS offered The Entertainer a comprehensive on-premises to SAP Commerce Cloud migration package, including an upgrade from Hybris 6.5 to 2211. KPS’s cloud converter package brought together standardised processes, IP, and artefacts to de-risk and streamline the migration – an approach which would allow The Entertainer to transition with minimal disruption and – importantly –within a fixed cost and timeframe. 

Having worked with KPS on previous projects, the team valued its high level of expertise and boutique agency feel, despite its growing European footprint and access to a large team of expert developers. But most importantly, the KPS team showed a unique understanding of the business and aligned seamlessly with The Entertainer’s very specific needs.

The most critical point for success was the importance placed on leveraging existing customisations in the current platform, rather than opting for a complete overhaul and losing the vast investment already made. KPS’s strategy focused on enabling the brand to move to a cloud-based system quickly, ensuring customer experience features could be retained, while continuing to innovate and improve CX without the risk and cost of a lengthy transformation.

By offering a fixed-cost, time-bound migration, KPS ensured that the project was successfully delivered on time and on budget. 

As Tim Hillman, CTO at KPS, outlines: “We recognise that customers want value more quickly and don’t want to embark on long, lengthy, costly transformation projects. We wanted to create an offering to convert customers over to cloud quickly, using that important investment they have already made, and rapidly deploy the solution to cloud as an enabler for future growth. I think that is the really important thing, the solution we have provided allows us to de-risk that – but to add certainty to deliverables and timescales.”

Despite the inherent challenges of an upgrade, the collaborative project team managed to navigate any unforeseen issues effectively. This success was attributed to the strong partnership, constant transparent communication and the high level of expertise KPS has accumulated managing bespoke transition journeys like this.

As Andy Rayner, DevOps Manager in the Digital Team at The Entertainer comments:

Since moving towards the new composable platform, The Entertainer has seen significant improvements in agility and release speed, reducing its release cycle from five weeks to just two. The new platform has also delivered speed improvements and enabled the business to move to a more strategic standpoint – following up on new projects and innovations with greater ease and confidence. Day-to-day operations are noticeably smoother and more efficient, allowing for a faster turnaround on projects and a more dynamic, effective approach to its business growth journey.

The success of the project not only enhanced the credibility of the small digital team within the company but has also fostered stronger relationships for KPS and SAP, laying a solid foundation for future collaboration.

Looking ahead, The Entertainer aims to gradually move towards a more composable commerce space, using the open API framework of SAP.
Andy Rayner recommends that other transformation leaders thoroughly explore the capabilities of their existing platforms before considering a complete switch, highlighting the importance of gradual, strategic transitions that align with business goals. In a time where there are a lot of cost pressures everywhere, transformations through composable commerce will add value and make sure you realise that value quickly.

The Entertainer’s journey towards a modern, composable commerce technology platform showcases the power of strategic partnerships and thoughtful transformation planning. With the support of KPS and SAP, The Entertainer has successfully navigated the challenges of upgrading its system, helping it to achieve greater agility, innovate quickly, and aim for growth in a profoundly competitive retail market.