Dymocks modernises system used to manage 40 million products

Dymocks has modernised its core product information management (PIM) system, home to data on 40 million books and other products, cutting associated infrastructure costs and improving pricing consistency across web and brick-and-mortar stores.

Chafic Abdallah.

Head of architecture and transformation Chafic Abdallah told the recent AWS Summit Sydney that the retailer had been using a commercial off-the-shelf PIM system, but elected to “modernise” it to be composed entirely of AWS-native services instead.

The retailer operates both company-owned and franchised stores.

Franchisees can earn revenue from online click-and-collect and in-store fulfilment of orders “completed through Dymocks’ website”, according to the company's brochureware.

Before modernising the PIM, Abdallah said it was complex to “be compliant with our duties towards our franchisees to keep the same price [of goods] on the web and in the stores.”

“At Dymocks, some of our key business objectives are to make the franchise business more attractive, and to maintain a great omnichannel experience,” he said.

The PIM system is the heart of the Dymocks product catalogue, extracting data from files sent by suppliers on book title, author, ISBN and pricing, and storing it centrally.

This is then polled by other enterprise systems such as those used for ecommerce, point-of-sale and advanced analytics, and is also used to ensure data consistency across Dymocks’ omnichannel operations.

Abdallah said the previous off-the-shelf PIM system “worked and did its job” but ultimately belonged in a museum.

“It wasn’t capable of keeping up with the growth we wanted to achieve at Dymocks,” he said.

“It was costing us incremental infrastructure costs month-on-month …, north of $250,000 US dollars per annum just to run three boxes that integrate with different enterprise systems at Dymocks.”

“With that came a huge operational cost. Some of these boxes would take a full day just to reboot. We didn’t want to contemplate the impact if one of these boxes went down. Patching was [also] a horrendous operational activity for us. 

“The operations team did an incredible job trying to maintain this system at an incredible cost, and the consequence is we had incremental tech debt growing by the day.”

Although considered a risky candidate for modernisation, Dymocks - with assistance from AWS and an undisclosed partner - elected to modernise the PIM system.

The retailer made use of an AWS transformation methodology called ModAx - modernisation experience-based acceleration - to select and weigh candidates for modernisation and map out a cadence for the work.

While modernising the PIM was considered a risk, it also came with potentially high rewards for the company, which led to the project being progressed.

“We manage 40 million-plus products in our PIM system. That’s not a walk in the park to fathom how you move away from such a legacy system to a modern system,” Abdallah said.

“With AWS we were able to modernise it.

“The key thing is we were able to reduce 90 percent of our infrastructure cost with AWS native services, and I’m not counting the cost of maintenance and licenses that we didn’t have to pay for going forward or the operational overhead that came with a legacy system. 

“We were able to … uplift our business capabilities as well. We are able to ship product information every 30 minutes and product pricing changes and availability changes across the millions of products every hour.

“Previously, we were only able to do that once a day with that exorbitant cost that we were sustaining month-on-month, year-on-year. 

“We also got an uplift in our technological capabilities with how we do data hygiene and data management overall.”

In addition, Abdallah said that Dymocks’ ICT team had been “unshackled from operational overheads” associated with the previous PIM system - time that could be repurposed for innovation and to drive further operational modernisation.

He added that the work would feed into “the next phase of transformation” at Dymocks, as the retailer works toward a ‘store of the future’ vision.

Ry Crozier attended AWS Summit Sydney as a guest of AWS.