Morrisons customers
raise a glass to Retail Agility ThoughtWorks delivered the mobile website for Morrisons’ first transactional e-commerce application, letting customers explore and purchase wine online. With re-usable enterprise services and colleague knowledge gained from the project, Morrisons can launch into additional online market segments with confidence and speed. Retail agility, achieved.
Benefits ThoughtWorks delivered this technically challenging project, including both mobile UX and systems integration components, as planned, on a committed deadline. Thanks to the re-usable services and the experience gained, Morrisons can now launch into additional online market segments with confidence and speed. Retail agility, achieved. Technology
Technology Morrisons has partnered with ThoughtWorks to help in a major strategic push for greater retail agility. Retail agility is the ability to take advantage of new markets, channels, products and customer segments at a speed that keeps up with fast-changing consumer habits and technology. For at least a decade, technology in the retail sector has been evolving at a pace that businesses are hard-pressed to keep up with. But because consumer preferences are moving just as quickly, retailers have to adapt and become more agile. Morrisons has been working with ThoughtWorks to streamline and automate internal logistics, making its brick and mortar operations more efficient and responsive to changes in demand. Morrisons is also making a major investment in building its online presence, and ThoughtWorks has now delivered the first results in that part of the partnership—a mobile web application for the retailer’s new Morrisons Cellar website. ThoughtWorks built the cross-mobile application—for iPhone, Android and other HTML5capable devices—along with a set of re-usable back-end enterprise system services for content management, customer accounts, payments, fulfillment processing and other retail functions. With the new services layer and the internal knowledge gained from the Morrisons Cellar project, Morrisons can launch into additional online market segments with confidence and speed. Retail agility, achieved.
The mobile website was built upon a simple micro web framework constructed over Java servlets all hosted inside a Tomcat container. Other tools used were StringTemplate, JQuery and HTML 5 Mobile Boilerplate. A typical stack of JUnit and WebDriver were used for testing. The website was backed by a set of RESTful services constructed with Jersey and hosted inside the Tomcat container. Other tools used were Jackson for the JSON output and PicoContainers. A stack of JUnit and RestAssured were used for testing.
Enterprise systems integration is a major element of online infrastructure To get a head start for their online push, Morrison’s had earlier acquired Kiddicare.com—the UK’s leading online retailer of children’s clothing and accessories—with the intent of leveraging both the technical infrastructure (including WebSphere e-commerce) and physical infrastructure (warehousing, distribution network and the like) for entry to other online market segments.
Mobile web approach shrinks the work to fit the available time Morrisons had already announced a launch timeframe for its first online effort, and it was critical to keep to that. The new product team would have to make adjustments in order to develop and test the necessary backend functions for online retailing while at the same time, designing the user experience and developing the entire front-end for both the desktop and mobile applications.
These new enterprise services were then used by both the desktop and mobile teams for the new applications, as they proceeded to work on front-end and UI design and development.
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ThoughtWorks’ ability to integrate the new online applications with our enterprise architecture was critical. We know there are small shops able to churn out mobile applications in a very short time. But for an enterprise of our scale, mobile development is analogous to an iceberg. The mobile front-end—what everyone sees—is just the tip, the part above the water. But that’s just a small part of the complexity of building the overall application.
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Ken Platt Head of Online Multichannel
Morrisons uncorks the new website, on time.
Instead of building different applications specifically for iOS and Android, ThoughtWorks proposed building a single mobile web application instead. Advanced features in HTML5 now mean that web apps for mobile devices can deliver most if not all the same capabilities of native apps, while saving significantly on development and testing. That allowed ThoughtWorks to develop all the complicated systems integration components that were needed, while still delivering an application that works for all mobile customers.
The new Morrisons Cellar application incorporates a rich feature set including a three-step online “Taste Test” along with a wine recommendations engine, a wine “case builder,” and multimedia content. The mobile web version includes all the features of the desktop web application, but with a UI design that is optimised for smaller screen real estate across all platforms. Despite the schedule pressure, the RESTful services were built to be re-used for future Morrisons online endeavors, and support desktop web, mobile web, and also native applications for iPhone, iPad and Android.
What the customer sees is just the “tip of the iceberg” for mobile applications
ThoughtWorks and Morrisons are now building an Innovation and Development Centre in Manchester to rapidly build out the multichannel business. Meanwhile, customer feedback is helping the team optimise Morrisons Cellar to create the smoothest wine shopping experience in the UK, before moving on to additional form factors such as tablet.
ThoughtWorks brought in tech leads and developers with the necessary array of UI design, web development and enterprise system integration experience from as far away as Bangalore to work with Morrisons. ThoughtWorks built and tested a complete set of backend services linking to both Morrisons and Kiddicare.com systems for logistics, payments, customer accounts and other key functions.
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