OPO Oeschger AG is a leading trader for Swiss carpenters
With 140 Mio CHF turnover it offers over 60k products: from various fittings (e.g. furniture, kitchen, lighting, sliding door) to tools and fastening technology.
The company has almost 100 years of tradition and pays great attention to modern technologies that are considered an integral part of a successful sales process.
The project
In 2012, OPO decided to phase out their CMS-based eCommerce and build a new B2B Omnichannel solution based on the SAP Commerce (Hybris) platform from scratch.
We designed the architecture based on requirements gathered in the first phase of the project. After two years of intensive work, the new OPO Oeschger eCommerce platform was launched and since then, we are continuously working on improving and maintaining it in multiple aspects.
Currently, the company’s product catalogue contains more than 60k articles and the system handles over 1k orders daily.
The level of commitment received from Antologic and its developers helped OPO Oeschger undergo a great part of its digital transformation.
Challenges
The past eight years have led to many different challenges. As stated, the team structure depended on the project state and plans for the near future. We present those that were most important from our point of view.
OPO was and is a leader on the market
Despite the 100 years of experience in traditional business, OPO Oeschger has always been a leader in the digital market in Switzerland. One of the values of the company is to work with modern technologies and always be one (or sometimes two!) steps ahead of the competition. Therefore, we put a lot of engineering effort to support their digital transformation. That includes implementing features designed by OPO Oeschger, migrating to the newest version of SAP Commerce (Hybris) and maintaining the whole system.
To build features like an LED configurator (where a user can build his tailored LED product in an intuitive way) or a wishlist combined with automated orders required quite an effort. They were innovative at the time of the implementation and are still setting trends on the market. The most important aspect of those is, of course, related to the end user benefit. They can configure the complicated LED structure with assurance that the given configuration is valid or can automate the process of repetitive orders.
Quality is an extremely important aspect
Due to quantity and nature of customers, and the fact that OPO Oeschger is a market leader, the quality of the system must meet the highest stamdards. Since 2012 we introduced and improved many processes that support and automate quality assurance.
No-downtime deployments combined with automated tests and formalized release & deployment procedures bring the overall quality of the system to a new level.
Introduction of the SCRUM methodology helped change the working habits and improve the team’s level of transparency. That was one of the turning points that helped us organize and maintain the way of work.
Thanks to continuous process improvements and automation we managed to reduce the planned features’ time to market.
Remote but like on-site
The team is international and is spread across three countries. Was it simple to build trust in such an environment? Clearly not. How was it built? Hard work, commitment and a good understanding of business always pay off. We are working mostly remotely (90% of the time), in case of a specific need we visit each other. It helps us to keep the identity of our multi-national team and to integrate with members from the other countries. Thanks to the good work practice, SCRUM methodology and above all, the attitude of all the team members, at the end of the day the fact that the team is geographically dispersed has no impact on the delivery.
Maintenance & support
We work together since 2012 and apart from new features implementations we are supporting the project also in the field of maintenance. Bug fixing, off-hours support and weekend deployments require a certain level of commitment but are paying off with the level of trust we build together with OPO Oeschger.
The team & our role
It is a hard task to summarize the team structure as it has been evolving over 8 years and what is even more important it had always been tailored to reflect the current state of the project. We have been providing various specialists to OPO Oeschger, including architects, backend Hybris & frontend developers, quality assurance engineers, scrum masters and project managers.
Depending on the phase, emphasis was set on different roles (e.g. in development mode the team consisted of 5 SAP Commerce (Hybris) developers, whilst in the maintenance phase it was reduced to 2 developers).
A demanding and complex project with even more demanding customer and technology. Our main goal was always to offer our customers the best service they could get
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