It has become out of fashion to be just a retail, bank or pizzeria. The traditional, successful business is seeking to move away from past victories by heading to the high-speed train to the digital future station. Group "M.Video-Eldorado" in this sense is no exception.
The debate over whether online will prevail over traditional business formats has been going on for 20 years, and the pandemic has only heated up the debate. Yes, we often order food for ourselves and the cat at home, but the need to test a laptop or smartphone before buying also remains. It is convenient when the service is "seamless" - I chose it in the application, looked in the store, clicked, paid, received. Hybrid models that combine both online and real life, at the peak of growth in a variety of areas - education, retail, medicine, finance.
What IT development and expertise do hybrid businesses need?why it is impossible to take and close stores and how it is connected with innovations, says Victoria Kunina, Director of Digital Transformation of M.Video-Eldorado Group.
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- “I wanted to” is not the term. The M.Video network launched an online store in 2000 - twenty years ago, in 2015 we already worked as an omni-retailer, that is, the site and stores were synchronized, and we offered uniform prices and services across all channels. If we talk about back-end processes, we have been using predictive analytics for the supply of goods to stores for a long time, blockchain for settlements with suppliers and biometrics for tracking working hours. So we are not new to technology, and this experience helped us a lot during the pandemic.
The active growth online did not stop us, on the contrary, we took the lead. And I want more. We see great potential in our own business model that combines online and shopping.
Customers need fast, I would say instant, access to online orders, the ability to test something before buying, the ability to ultimately share responsibility for a large spend with someone. Stores give it. If they are a continuation of the online platform, mobile technologies, if data analytics is at the heart of all processes there.
Now our level of digitalization is 55-60 percent, which is quite confident for retail. In the next two years, we want to increase it by almost one and a half times - both in terms of customer services, making mobile solutions the basis, and improving internal business processes. It plans to evolve from a traditional retail company into a technology company in two years, with a digital business maturity level of 75-77 percent.
A good slogan, of course. But still, when do you plan to move from words to deeds?
- In fact, over the past few years, we have made significant headway in digital transformation. I would like to note that digitalization for us is not only IT.
We are simultaneously moving in three directions at once: team building, product development, and digital transformation process management. In 2020, the number of in-house developers has grown significantly. For example, the Data science team has tripled. In 2021, we plan to hire 600 more programmers and technology experts.
Today we need architects, Java developers, QA leaders, Product owners (product management managers), analysts, Data science. If you have ambitions and a desire to do something on a national scale, feel free to knock on our doors , there is enough work for everyone.
But why spend money on expensive internal development, is it much cheaper to hire external programmers to outsource?
- We believe that digital services should be born within the company, because we know our business and our customers better. In general, in my opinion, the time for insourcing has come for M.Video-Eldorado Group - we are ready to launch digital projects by internal contractors.
Today the ratio of outsourcing to insourcing is about 75:25 percent. In the next 2 years, the company plans to change the ratio of insourcing to outsourcing to 70:30.
It sounds a little "hacky", of course. Are you not afraid not to cope with such an ambitious task?
- Perhaps not all of the company's digital projects are still in sight. But our guys from the development team are doing really cool things. At the end of 2020, the company decided to move away from centralized change management by reformatting the Business Transformation Directorate into a cross-team option within the Group's business units.
Thus, in every project, be it e-commerce or the direction of development of internal microservices (HR, accounting, finance, e-document flow), today there is a universal team: Product owner, architect, development team with 100 percent workload.
As a result, the business formulates a hypothesis, and the developers "make this fairy tale come true." Then the project either "flies" or we finish it, and then it will definitely "fly".
But this is in words. In fact, everything is much larger. For example, in 2020, we built an infrastructure for data analytics and machine learning based on Yandex.Cloud. Also, the Tableau tool for building interactive dashboards was introduced.
In addition, recommendation services for the selection of goods in online and retail were launched. We have implemented a chatbot that covers 30% of topics and fully automates 17% of customer calls to the contact center. Heatmaps of stores and a bot were created to alert sellers about queues and “single customers” based on data from CCTV cameras. And all this in 2020 alone!
By the way, online sales in 2020 grew 5 times ("Hello, coronavirus!"). So we had to seriously be puzzled by the development of the online store, updating our mobile applications.
Can you explain the logic of the development of self-written microservices, in the presence of developed ERP systems such as SAP or Oracle?
- Nobody abandons time-tested solutions. Simply, if you need to "roll" here and now a simple script that simplifies the life of a salesman, accountant or financier, in a large system you will have to search for ends half your life. With writing your own microservices, speeds increase significantly. And nerve cells are preserved better.
But with this approach, you will have "crutches" and a "zoo" of incomprehensible solutions everywhere. The programmer left the company and took away the sacred knowledge of how everything is arranged and works?
- In fact, no one here invents the wheel. We write in Java and other common programming languages. In addition, we ensure that our architecture does not stray from common industry standards.
Can you tell us about the know-how or some breakthrough technologies that you are developing today? Maybe you train drones for delivery or plan to introduce augmented reality soon?
- To be honest, I hardly imagine how drones will drag the refrigerator across all of Moscow. Or a washing machine, for example. Although I do not exclude that logistics, especially in terms of the use of self-driving cars, will change significantly in the next five years. In general, we invest serious resources in machine learning, Big Data, predictive analytics. All of this affects the sales and loyalty of our customers.
The ability to anticipate customer expectations is a lifesaver for a retailer. Plus, there is something magical about it. Although under the hood we have a very advanced recommendation system. Already today, when visiting our site, you can see in the section "People buy with this product" or "Bestsellers" the most relevant positions to your interests.
How do you divide areas of responsibility? There is a digital transformation office, there is IT. Who is in charge?
“Everything is simple here: IT and the digital transformation office are directly subordinate to the CEO.
The Digital Transformation Office is responsible for focus on digitalization, product methodology and transparency on progress. For IT implementation and technological support of our activities.
In fact, programmers are the engine, the heart of our digitalization. They provide restructuring of manufacturing processes and architecture to microservices in key blocks. They have the implementation of separable and flexible key canonical services, the creation of competence centers in IT and BigData.
They are left with the key task in ensuring the flexibility and reliability of the company's IT landscape, developing a data platform and working with data to create services in digital products, and building a targeted production process for DevSecOps systems.
Well, let's say they convinced me and I was going to come to your company. Where to knock?
- The simplest thing is to go to the website: jobinme.mvideoeldorado.ru/it... Everything is described, written, told and shown there. You just need to fill out the form and welcome aboard! By the way, you can ask questions in the comments to this post or write in a personal message. We will tell, show, explain everything.
It's very interesting inside us. When I am asked why a cool programmer should go to work in the M.Video-Eldorado Group, I usually say that our scale and ambitions can make your head spin. The main thing is that it does not spin for very long, there is a lot of work. It is important to be in time for everything!
PS From the life of a programmer of the M.Video-Eldorado Group: a look from the inside
Alexander Zelenyuk, Head of the Technology Platform Development Department, Information Technology Directorate, MVideo-Eldorado Group :
─ I am the head of the competence center for software development in various areas (java, backend, etc.) and DevOps.
In addition, I am in charge of a team that creates core services platforms (backend microservices) for use in areas related to our direct business, focused on sales, logistics and pricing. These are all kinds of services for finding goods, cataloging them, a large logistic conglomerate of services, personalization services and price recommendations, taking into account the geographical characteristics of customers, and others.
Today our developments are successfully used in retail, logistics and warehouse management, office functions. Note that all this is done internally, using our own resources based on Open source tools. For the backend we mainly use java or node.js, we are thinking about starting using go.
At this stage, we form product teams for each of the conditional areas, dividing them into subdomains: “catalog”, “prices and promo”, “customers”, “personalization”, “logistics block” and so on. For this, we go into various technologies. We are actively using service Mesh, we are migrating our infrastructure to the Clouds (here we are at Yandex). We build various Kubernetes clusters for various services.
In fact, a certain challenge lies in the fact that at this stage we are experiencing a shortage of people. The second challenge is the construction of a microservice architecture based on various Open source solutions. This is a kind of patchwork quilt. But we are coping with it successfully.
First of all, we have a unified developer community. Despite the fact that people are assigned to specific projects, we try to regularly rotate employees from one zone to another, organize the exchange of knowledge in the developers sync or hands format. At such meetings, the guys talk about ongoing projects, share life hacks as part of the solutions being implemented.
In addition, in order to streamline the architecture being created, we have a space in Confluence, where we maintain a single register of all services, which describes their functionality and technological component (what they consist of and how they are operated in terms of infrastructure and code).
In general, our team is capable of working in almost any conditions. We started with the project of the above-mentioned business microservices in early 2020, on the eve of the pandemic. We assembled a conditional Dream Team or "Special Forces Team" and began to make microservices. Yes, sometimes these are products "from under the knife", in culinary terms, but the drive from such speed and freedom is special.
In a few weeks we managed to successfully implement integrations with three taxi providers, learned how to deliver our goods from closed stores by taxi in a couple of hours, learned how to deliver to partner points of delivery of goods, integrated with Russian Post, Pyaterochka.
It is noteworthy that some of these projects lay in backlogs for a long time. Sometimes for six months, eight months. And here, in the conditions of a high concentration of each team member and a focus on finding optimal solutions in isolation, as well as in the presence of "special forces of developers", we managed to cope with all this six-month backlog in less than a month.
Today we have conditionally three major areas of development. The first is the large, platform-based part, with shared microservices. The second area is the online shopper experience. This is all about any online communication channels and points of contact with the buyer. This is a mobile application, an online store, social networks, and so on.
And the third is the digitalization of our store space and bringing the maximum online experience into the retail network. Considering that more and more people come to us with smartphones, tablets and smartwatches, we would like all these devices to benefit their owners and us, of course, when they visit us.
All these ambitious tasks, as you know, require more and more working hands, growing from the shoulders and competent brains within the company. Therefore, I strongly urge talented developers to come to us more boldly.
Coming today to M.Video-Eldorado, you have a unique opportunity to get cool projects and interact with the same Mail or Yandex.
And also, you can look at the world of product development not through the eyes of a dude who writes software for other software. In our case, it is possible to create solutions that bring real benefit to specific people. If you come to M.Video-Eldorado stores, you have every chance to experience the quality and benefits of your work for yourself.
In addition, given that one of the trends enshrined in the company's strategy is the development of promising technologies, our developers have a unique opportunity to rapidly succeed in them. The company will definitely help with this. There are definitely resources and the necessary potencies for this.
Welcome!