How to Optimize Existing IT by Modernizing Retail Processes

There is a concentrated effort today in the technology world for businesses to navigate towards becoming a digital business.

This is not a simple turn-key solution, nor is it something easily achieved without taking a step-by-step approach to your complex environments.

Let's face it, there have been many commitments made in the past to certain technology paths. There are legacy investments that are still returning enough value to cause hesitation when reaching to pull their plug. There could be partially completed projects that were chosen in the course of spending political capitol, making it nearly impossible to abandon them without endangering the entire IT landscape.

These are just a few of the issues that necessitate one of the first steps being to evaluate optimizing existing IT investments.

Existing IT

When looking to update or modernize the existing IT investments, it's about optimizing existing work.

There are many systems, services, applications and processes that make up the IT landscape. The trick is to obtain a view of them while moving towards business goals, leveraging quick wins by bringing together existing work in new and effective ways.

Business processes can often be found that leverage existing components, that once organized in a new way begin to immediately provide new business value. To illustrate this line of thought, let's imagine how leveraging existing deployed workloads and services help to optimize a retail organization.

Modernizing retail

Each example below optimizes by leveraging existing projects and investments, while deploying in a modern container-based Cloud platform using open technologies. They may exists as standard hosted hardware deployments, on private cloud solutions, in public cloud hosting or in hybrid-cloud environments. All four footprints are possible when leveraging open technologies and modern application development, showcased through the Red Hat Cloud Suite product.

Online web shop

Our focus is an existing online web shop known as the Cool Store. It leverages some business logic tied in to a front end web shop. The problem initially is that the logic is not always centralized and some of it is even maintained in an external spreadsheet.

By centralizing this business logic in decision tables, guided rules, domain specific languages and other types of business logic definitions it's possible to modernize the Cool Store. It is possible to automate shipping calculations and apply special discounts based on offerings applied to certain products.

Available online in Red Hat Demo Central and leveraging open technologies such as JBoss EAP and JBoss BRMS along with the OpenShift Container Platform, the Cool Store retail demo project delivers an optimized solution.

Online persistent web shop

This example is an extension of the above online web shop example that added persistence in the form of a separately deployed container with a database. The Cool Store retail example is configured in this project to leverage the external database as would be done in most organizations.

Available online at Red Hat Demo Central and leveraging open technologies such as JBoss EAP and JBoss BRMS along with the OpenShift Container Platform, the Cool Store persistence example is delivering another modernized retail process solution.

Optimize IT series

AppDev in the Cloud with Red Hat Cloud Suite

This is not the only article in the series.

If interested in reading more you can catch up on the other areas learning how optimizing process applications enables leveraging your existing investments:

• Modernizing HR processes
• Modernizing Financial processes
• Modernizing Retail processes
• Modernizing Travel processes

Stay tuned for the other articles coming soon.