After the collapse of the heritage department store BHS and the acquisition by the AL Mana group in 2016, the new owners decided to rebrand as The British Home Store, relaunching in the UK purely as an online entity.

THE CHALLENGE

Greenlight Commerce was engaged to do something unprecedented – deliver a new website using the SAP Hybris platform, integrated into SAP Business ByDesign, in just over seven weeks.

THE STRATEGY

To deliver a project of the scope within such a tight timescale required watertight planning and deadlines, plus five key components:

Accelerated consulting and requirements settingphase

**?**This meant, having four days instead of six weeks, to understand what was important to the retailer in order to maximise the investment as early as possible.

Accelerators & pre-integrations

Using the SAP Hybris Commerce Accelerator, plus features including connectors to payments, postcode lookup and analytics, which we had pre-integrated were key factors in getting BHS running quickly with minimal set up time. The out-of-the-box capabilities of SAP’s Business ByDesign enabled the business to start with the Financials, Supply Chain Management and Customer Relationship Managment system in place from day one.

Cloud tech

Cloud-based deployment is the fastest to set up, requiring lower IT involvement and offering a quicker time to value.

Focus on minimum viable project (MPV)

Delivered a MVP for launch and created a roadmap to evolve with the trading team’s future requirements, including possible international and store expansion.

Extensive experience of SAP

Award-winning partners of SAP, both teams have in-depth product and technical knowledge of the Hybris and Business ByDesign solutions, built up over many years of delivering successful projects.

THE RESULTS

Bhs.com went live at 6:00am on 29th September, on budget, in seven weeks.

It was important to British Home Store that the site wasn't just trading, but stable, in time for peak trading, which was successfully achieved – British Home Store reported 239% increase in sales on Black Friday and the platform and infrastructure needed no technical attention and handled all the site traffic from a performance perspective.

And because of the exceptionally fast time to market, The British Home Store was able to start making revenue very quickly.