Faster fulfilment for The Warehouse Group with DevOps

The Warehouse is one of New Zealand's largest general merchandise retail groups, operating market-leading brands including The Warehouse, Noel Leeming, and Warehouse Stationery. With a purpose to help Kiwis live better every day, The Warehouse Group is committed to delivering exceptional customer experiences.

The driving force

The Warehouse's fulfilment team faced significant challenges with their legacy system, which hindered their ability to efficiently manage product distribution to customers. The system was difficult to update, lacked automated testing and a Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline, resulting in low confidence when releasing new code. Additionally, the team recognized the need to improve their agile development processes, address capability gaps, and enhance logging for issue tracking and debugging.

It has been a great partnership working with ClearPoint where we have been able to leverage their considerable skill in the DevOps space to not only deliver value to the business, but also to upskill our own team members”

— Tim Duly, GM Engineering, The Warehouse Group

The solution

ClearPoint collaborated with The Warehouse's fulfilment team to implement a Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline for their order fulfilment application and introduce DevOps practices leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS). The solution included:

• An automated CI pipeline based on Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, and Helm, with integrated unit and end-to-end acceptance tests.
• CD implementation to enable faster and safer releases by automating deployment to integration, UAT, and on-demand production environments.
• OpenTracing implementation keyed to logs for cross-microservice standard logging, significantly reducing problem diagnosis time.
• Prometheus implementation as a recommended standard for exposing metrics to SignalFX.
• Coaching and support to raise the maturity level of The Warehouse's development processes.

Enabling feature toggling has allowed the teams to do more frequent code deployments, removed bottlenecks from development flow and increased the team performance.”

— Irina Southwell, Test Automation Practice Lead, ClearPoint

The outcome

The collaboration between ClearPoint and The Warehouse Group yielded impressive results:

• Delivered a microservices-based order fulfilment solution in time for the critical end-of-year Christmas sales period.
• Transitioned from manual deployments to automated, on-demand deployments with minimal risk.
• Implemented feature toggles, empowering the business to control feature releases without risk.
• Improved picking and packing processes in fulfilment centres, resulting in faster and more accurate operations.
• Upskilled technical teams in continuous delivery, DevOps, and related practices.

Key Technologies: DevOps Transformation, CD/CI pipeline, Continuous Delivery, Test Automation, Kubernetes, Docker, Microservices architecture, AWS cloud deployment, Elasticsearch, Fluent Bit, Kibana, OpenTracing, Prometheus, Vue JS, Feature toggles