- Deployment Downtime: Prior to engaging Avatria, New Era had no ability to deploy even minor releases without downtime. New Era felt that it was critical to achieve zero-downtime deployments if they were to take their flagship site global, otherwise downtime in some users' peak traffic period would severely impact the user experience.
- Global Rollout Inefficiencies: New Era had observed that the effort to launch their site in each subsequent country was virtually equal to the original rollout. Before embarking on a full global rollout, they sought strategies to benefit from economies of scale and country or regional redundancies.
- Cloud Migration Strategy: New Era knew that they would need to migrate from Commerce Cloud v1 to Commerce Cloud v2 eventually, but was struggling with the prioritization of the initiative, given resource conflicts.
- Regulatory Compliance: New Era realized that they would have to meet legal restrictions for various countries they planned to expand into, and sought expert guidance on key regulations as well as strategies for achieving compliance.
New Era
LOCATION
Buffalo, NY
INDUSTRY
Apparel Retail
PLATFORM DETAILS
SAP Commerce
Summary
New Era is a leading international sports and lifestyle brand with thousands of vendors, and partnerships with some of the largest sports organizations on the planet (e.g. MLB). In the Fall of 2019 the New Era team engaged Avatria to help them explore topics that they viewed as critical to their ability to scale neweracap.com globally in an operationally efficient manner while providing positive customer experiences as a leading lifestyle brand.
New Era Pain Points
Avatria Recommendations
- Rolling Deployments: Avatria educated New Era on how they could conduct Rolling Deployments, so the end-user wouldn’t lose their session or see a maintenance page during a website deployment.
- Global Rollout Strategy: Avatria recommended a methodical approach to global rollout, including establishing and deploying a foundation of common features, organizing countries by similar features and secondary objectives, piloting countries in each group, and then launching remaining group countries as a configuration exercise.
- Delayed Cloud Migration: Avatria reviewed costs, benefits, preparations, and sequencing of the Commerce Cloud upgrade, helping New Era develop their plan for migration.
- Privacy Recommendations: Avatria explored some known regulations in the European Union (GDPR), United States (CCPA), Russia, and China. We discussed their impact to New Era processes and procedures and made recommendations for how one might approach compliance more holistically.
In addition to exploring these topics, Avatria organized an after-hours visit to Sports World Chicago, one of New Era’s largest Chicagoland customers, to discuss topics related to:
- Product positioning in stores
- B2B purchasing experience with New Era
- Things New Era does well vs. things they can improve on
Results
- New Era implemented our rolling deployments approach and piloted it in their current ecosystem.
- New Era engaged Avatria to conduct a four-week audit of their existing processes and systems, and to develop a strategy for rolling out their remaining countries. New Era subsequently implemented this approach.
- New Era paused their migration efforts for an additional year, resulting in significant cost-savings in their annual licensing with SAP.
- Our introduction to Sports World Chicago led New Era to improve key components of their B2B experience thereby making it easier for their B2B customers to order and track their inventory.