Specsavers holds 1,978 branches around the world, turning over £2.6 billion in 2017/18. As one of the largest multinational optical retail chains, they own a number of depots around the world focusing on manufacturing and logistics. When Specsavers add a new location, the systems that pick and dispatch stock are critically important.

The Challenge

The setup of a new warehouse location for Specsavers was a lengthy and costly exercise. Adding to the timeline and cost was the manual implementation of the JDA warehouse management system. The manual approach often led to mistakes, delays and frustration. There was also a drive for a single repeatable solution over the multiple sites in the supply chain.

What we did

Daemon and Specsavers agreed to automate the delivery of a vanilla JDA service. The project involved using DevOps automation tools to create a repeatable process to build and deploy the JDA solution. The pipeline included infrastructure as code, an Oracle database build and the JDA application build using Puppet.

The solution included testing to ensure the solution met design specifications and was ready to be configured fully and adopted into service.

Outcome

Using the automated solution, Specsavers were able to build the JDA WMS in days with only two resources, whereas historically this would have taken multiple teams weeks as well as carrying a high risk of inconsistency or error due to the level of manual activity.

By structuring the code in a modular way, Specsavers have also been able to get a huge level of reuse from the code in another delivery which required similar technologies, allowing them to reduce cost and time to market for that delivery. This reuse also saw a reduction in security risks identified for the second delivery as 75% as the code already included the lessons learnt from the JDA delivery.

This enabled Specsavers depot initiation to be more responsive to market demands, whilst removing the need for human intervention. The automation made the process scalable and created significant long term business efficiencies.

Result

• Use of Public Cloud enabled creation of IT infrastructure as code for a repeatable and reliable infrastructure creation
• Use of Puppet to automate the JDA build and configuration meant a reliable and repeatable method of rolling out JDA
• Overall the project resulted in a reduction from 2 elapsed weeks to 2 days. A significant reduction in cost and reduced error rate in the build process.