John Lewis & Partners uplifts operations with IBM Sterling Order Management system
John Lewis & Partners (JLP) is the UK’s largest employee-owned business, operating two brands through 34 John Lewis shops, hundreds of others and a strong e-commerce footprint through two websites. Such a prominent presence required sufficiently advanced order management systems to keep up with customer needs and expectations.
The retail giant had already demonstrated its operational efficiency, equipped with the IBM Sterling® Order Management system. However, the solution had reached end of support and needed to be replaced. JLP recognized the scalability and infrastructure-related savings that a cloud-based solution would provide. To deliver the quality of service and operational efficiency that was synonymous with its name, JLP wanted to employ a next-generation, cloud-based order management system.
JLP again looked to the IBM Sterling Order Management system as a solution. With IBM Business Partner® Cognizant, the organization began a huge undertaking to migrate from its on-premises IBM Sterling Order Management system 9.4. They started by moving the management of all new orders to the next-generation SaaS IBM Sterling Order Management system while retaining version 9.4 as a repository for orders placed before June 2023.
The complex and ambitious migration brought sweeping changes to the system. JLP amended over 300 interfaces, validated more than 150 order and data attributes, and developed around 40 feature switches and 25 order throttling configurations, coupled with over 300 test scenarios. The migration was executed in 6 carefully planned cutover phases with a 3-month dual run period to ensure a smooth transition. The project team worked closely with 17 application teams to test and prove the new system and developed 3 new migration processes to support uninterrupted operations during the transition.
With the hugely successful migration behind it, JLP saw significant benefits, such as improvements in automation testing, with approximately 95% of IBM Sterling Order Management APIs automated and included in daily regressions. The automated build release pipeline streamlined the development process, allowing for continuous, seamless upgrades to functional and technical capabilities while reducing the time for production releases from 4 weeks to 2 weeks. Additionally, JLP was able to increase operational efficiencies, decrease infrastructure maintenance efforts, provide better scalability, enhance productivity, improve automation testing coverage and access innovative features by parallel feature development. These improvements helped the company effortlessly handle both peak and off-peak demands.
JLP successfully migrated a total of 5.7 million closed orders and approximately 170,000 in-flight orders across 6 distinct cutover stages within 3 months. The process helped the company further enhance:
- Collaboration with its operations teams
- Demand synchronization amid dual runtime environments
- Data migration techniques and fine-tuning them
- Optimization of infrastructure utilization on SaaS platforms
With the project, JLP is on its way to fully decommissioning its older solution and tackling the migration of orders by web back office, which is linked with its overall strategy. The company also looks to leverage the solution’s additional functionalities, such as Order Service, to provide a single source of truth for customer orders and move away from on-premises to cloud-based solutions.
John Lewis & Partners (link resides outside of ibm.com) began trading over 150 years ago in 1864 on London's Oxford Street, and is a leading omni-channel retailer in the UK with 34 John Lewis shops and a growing online business.
Cognizant (link resides outside of ibm.com), an IBM Business Partner for over 20 years, helps clients modernize technology, reimagineprocesses, and transform experiences to stay ahead in a fast-changing world.
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