REXEL
Sector
Activity
An expert in multichannel distribution for the energy world, Rexel supports its professional customers—in industry, real-estate, and services—with sustainable and innovative solutions, including an extensive range of more than two million SKUs. The company sells its solutions from its 440 branches and 40 customer relations and expertise centers, as well as directly to work sites, and through rexel.fr, its e-commerce website.
Several years ago, Rexel adopted “More Customers, More SKUs, More Digital,” a new approach that aims to harness digital technology to boost value creation. Work on this front accelerated in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The retailer’s longstanding information system is based on a legacy IBM AS/400 architecture. This system was not designed to address the challenges of 24/7 BtoB e-commerce, or more generally to be compatible with digital sales and operations, including the rapid development and deployment of new tools and applications.
Hardis Group, which has maintained Rexel’s legacy system since 2004—including through Adelia—is now helping the retailer gradually transform its information system and shift to a modular architecture, to help the company accelerate its transformation to a digital, omnichannel retail model.
Project objectives
- Roll out a modular architecture to make the information system more agile and to create more value through new digital service
- Sustain business intelligence contained in developments made in the legacy AS/400 architecture
- Support the transformation of the legacy information system to remove barriers to digital retail
- Secure data exposed and exploited by digital services
- Develop new digital tools to facilitate retail operations and enhance the customer experience
Work performed
- Providing architecture expertise to help transform the information system and shift to a modular architecture
- Deploying a target information system with 24/7 availability of critical functions, plus an open, high-performance, upgradeable, and scalable design
- Securing and centralizing data access management
- Developing various business modules: a pricing engine for digital retail operations, a delivery engine to help the retailer uphold its customer promise (delivery to site within two hours, 24/7 collection in branches, etc.), a customer cockpit to encourage industry professionals to adopt web practices, and more
- Setting up DevOps processes and tools to scale and upgrade the new digital services
Benefits
- Modular architecture supporting digital retail and information system scalability
- Digitized, cross-cutting, collaborative, and scalable processes and file systems
- Tailor-made ERP functions gradually replaced by standard software (WMS, SPM, CRM, etc.) and/or scalable standalone features
- Automated interactions between digital processes and application components
- Ability to share information with customers, suppliers, and other partners in real time
- Data collected and enriched at scale and easily accessible to front-line businesses