Rinascente - Real Time Inventory

Retail & FMCG

Rinascente develops an application for the real-time calculation of stock availability in shops and warehouses.

Solutions:

Data Platform - Data Strategy

Technologies:

Aws - Kafka

Business Summary

Rinascente is located in nine prestigious stores in Italy, in large historical buildings, in the heart of major cities. Much more than shops: real references for the city and for high level shopping. Exclusive places born ‘for the city, with the city, in the city’. Rinascente opens to the public like a window on the world, becoming the stage not only for fashion, but for a theatre full of novelties, unique proposals and events. Each shop presents itself as a large house of brands, offering a unique experience.

In the last few years, Rinascente has embarked on a path to replicate the store experience also online. This digital transformation has required an effective integration of information between the company’s systems to support business processes.

Challenges and Goals

Retail and e-commerce channel integration
Enabling integrated, multi-touch point customer experience

Rinascente’s omnichannel vision is to replicate the customer experience of the stores online as well. In order to make the management of the two sales channels transparent and harmonised, it is necessary for all business systems involved in the purchasing processes, and in particular the new e-commerce systems, to have real-time information on stock availability in the shops and warehouses, in order to be able to respond appropriately to a customer order and to manage shipments and returns in the right way. A stock variation occurs whenever a customer places an online order (or a return) or makes a purchase in the shop, or when goods are unloaded from the central warehouse to be transferred to a peripheral shop or vice versa.

Three main objectives of Real Time Inventory:

Event-driven architecture

Modernising the means and style of integration between corporate systems by adopting a new event-oriented architecture

Retail systems integration with new e-commerce systems

Implementation of integration flows to distribute online transaction data to corporate management systems and share common master data and datasets with them

Real-time stock calculation

Implementation of a real-time stock status calculation engine for each product and store/warehouse pair

Solution

By adopting an event-driven platform and developing a real-time stock calculation engine, we are able to provide valuable information to the business and enterprise systems as soon as changes are generated from data sources.
Matteo Gabanini

Quantyca implemented the Real Time Inventory solution, designing a new event driven architecture and developing an event streaming platform based on Confluent Kafka.

Quantyca developed the new integration flows in the platform and built the Real Time Inventory calculation engine, based on the processing of events related to in-store transactions, online orders and returns and goods movement and implemented with stream processing technologies.

Thanks to the experience gained in this area, Quantyca defined in agreement with the customer the guidelines for using the platform, the standards and conventions to ensure the interoperability of the various systems in an event-driven paradigm, and provided support for the implementation of the platform’s monitoring framework.

Results

Rinascente achieved several goals, including:

the enabling of the online sales channel on the e-commerce site;
the real-time availability of key business process data in the company’s systems, to be used for operational and analytical purposes;
the reduction of integration costs through the new hub-and-spoke model based on event-driven data buses;
the modernisation of technology and data architecture.

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