The British Home Store | SAP Hybris Commerce Cloud build

The British Home Store | SAP Hybris Commerce Cloud build

PROJECT | THE BRITISH HOME STORE

Reviving a national treasure in just seven weeks

The British Home Store (formally known as BHS) is a heritage department store founded in 1928 selling homewares and specialising in lighting. In recent years, the retailer has been owned by a number of large retail chains, with the most recent acquisition taking place in June 2016. On the 29th September 2016, the new owners re-branded BHS as ‘The British Home Store‘, re-launching in the UK purely as an online entity.

BHS engaged Greenlight Commerce to deliver something that many people said was impossible – an SAP Hybris Commerce website, integrated into SAP Business ByDesign (ERP) in seven weeks.

Overview

  • Key requirements of new platform were that it was responsive, offered customers a level of personalisation, provided very modern and clean navigation and be scalable due to aggressive target over the next three years
  • It was important to BHS that the site wasn’t just trading, but stable, in time for Peak
  • They didn’t have an internal IT function so everything had to be delivered entirely by Partnerships

Unique solution

To deliver an enterprise level site within such a tight deadline required a number of key strategies:

ACCELERATED CONSULTING AND REQUIREMENTS SETTING PHASE

We set about quickly integrating the BHS and Greenlight Commerce teams though an accelerated consulting and requirements setting phase (4 days instead of 6 weeks), understanding what was important to BHS in order to maximise the investment as early as possible.

PRE-INTEGRATED MODEL

We used our SAP Hybris accelerator, ‘hylight’ to remove much of the time and complexity that is often the norm in building a new website. Built by our experts on a world-class platform, ‘hylight’ includes pre-integrated features and connectors to payments, postcode lookup and analytics. We also built connectors to SAP By Design to take feeds for inventory, pricing and order data.

FOCUS ON MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT (MVP)

Delivered a minimum viable product for launch and create a roadmap to evolve with the trading team’s future requirements, including possible international and store expansion.

By following a MVP approach, the business was able to make some compromises on desired functionality that resulted in a better understanding of the business needs. On several occasions this saved money as the initial requirement was not actually needed.

EXTENSIVE EXPERIENCE IN SAP HYBRIS COMMERCE

As SAP Hybris specialists, our team has in-depth product and technical knowledge of the SAP Hybris platform, particularly in the retail sector having delivered over 35 projects.

This combined with experience of working in challenging environments allowed us to be able to deliver an unbelievably fast Time To Market (TTM) of high quality to The British Home Store.

OPEN AND HONEST COMMUNICATION

Used truly agile methodology to facilitate communication at every single level, enabling us to adapt and react to the business needs (e.g. by using stories we keep an open channel of communication with BHS and they have insight of what is happening).

Project Details

  • eCommerce consultancy
  • eCommerce platform selection
  • Creative direction
  • UX design for desktop and mobile
  • Technical delivery and system integration
  • Project delivery and live support
  • Platform: SAP Hybris

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