Discount Tire - SAP Commerce Upgrade

Summary

A few years after their initial deployment, Discount Tire needed to modernize their SAP Commerce instance to take advantage of new capabilities within SOLR Search, the newly released Promotion Engine, and various other improvements that had been introduced since 5.5. However, with multiple projects and business critical initiatives ongoing, it was impossible to stop all work in order to focus solely on an upgrade.

Instead, the Avatria team recommended a parallel upgrade process in which the upgrade work would occur in tandem with new development, allowing other initiatives to be completed on schedule.

In-Place Upgrade SAP Commerce 5.5 > 6.7

To allow Discount Tire to fulfill all of its priorities, a small team worked to modernize the code base in parallel to the other ongoing projects. They began by focusing on making the existing code base compile and deploy with the latest version, then migrated or refactored features one by one to take advantage of newer implementation approaches.

The team operated behind the scenes for multiple months, even including an additional unplanned upgrade to the the latest SAP Commerce version (6.6 >6.7), which was released while the project was in flight. The structure of this critical work allowed all other initiatives to continue uninterrupted. When the timing was right, a code freeze was put in place, a short regression testing cycle was executed, and the newly modernized code base was deployed.

Avatria’s Impact

In addition to leading a team of Discount Tire resources in upgrade tasks, Avatria played a critical role in helping Discount Tire strategize the best sequencing and timing to incur minimal disruption to other projects. We were able to reduce the amount of refactoring required and enable faster deployment of the upgrade and all new tracks of work by coordinating with Discount Tire leadership to identify which projects were appropriate to begin prior to the upgrade and which would benefit from waiting for the modernized code base.