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HOWARD: Staples is the world's largest office products company with over $18 billion in sales in the past year. We're also proud to be the second largest online retailer with $5 billion in online retail revenue.
With 1,900 stores and over 74,000 worldwide associates, we really make it easier for business customers to find all the office products, technology, furniture and services that they need to run their business.
PUTUR: Our public presence is in Staples.com. That's for anything from the consumer to the home office, on up to smaller businesses.
HOWARD: Staples.com has three guiding principles: making it easy to find, easy to order and easy to check out. As we achieve these guiding principles, we will continue to stand out from the competition.
Staples.com, our business initiatives are inherently tied to our technology development platform. And frankly, our systems weren't getting it done. We were stuck in the mud, so to speak.
So, having more flexibility, having the ability to go to market faster with new initiatives and to stay current and really stay ahead of the competition was critical for our growth.
PUTUR: Staples wants the customer to be able to complete their shopping, no matter where they are: whether they're in a retail store, whether they want to complete it online or pick up the phone. We need to make it easy for them, and seamless, no matter what channel they're shopping through.
To Staples business delivery, innovation is about making every online transaction that our business customers do with us the easiest, most productive experience they have all day.
One of our innovations at Staples is cross channel integration. For example, a customer can go in one of our stores, purchase a number of items off the shelf, as well as stop at the kiosk and perhaps order some items they want delivered to their home. They can take both of those, go to the cash register and pay at the store in one purchase.
SAVOY: Staples wanted a platform that they could personalize to the individual user, personalize to the business, integrate to their back-end systems, and a solution that would perform today and into the future.
PUTUR: We worked with IBM leveraging their commerce products as well as their other supporting software products and hardware to build that new online presence. Staples' IT vision is around a Service-Oriented Architecture.
The benefits we're looking for from our SOA-based architecture is really reuse, speed of time to market, and it helps us con-contain our costs. If we can take that one asset and use it across multiple channels that's very beneficial for us.
SAVOY: IBM Global Business Services and IBM Software experts teamed with Staples to design, deploy and integrate to Staples back end using WebSphere MQ. Their online sites are powered by WebSphere Commerce, which runs on top of WebSphere Application Server. Their data is stored in DB2 database, and the whole platform runs on System p servers.
PUTUR: With what we've got in the WebSphere Commerce platform, we not only can serve our e-commerce channels, but we're actually looking to that platform to provide core common capabilities to other channels.
HOWARD: Well, if staples.com is to be a best in class office products provider, we wanted to find the best in class technology partner to partner with. IBM really fit that bill with their understanding of the technology platform and the retail industry.
PUTUR: We wanted a partner who could grow with us, a partner that could offer more than one piece of the solution, a partner that understood what it took to really scale a solution to a business of our size.
The key benefits that we've got out of this is really a scalable platform that can provide the performance we need for our growing business, and gives us the tool sets so we can respond to our ever-changing customer expectations.
HOWARD: We've increased our online conversion rate by 60 percent. We've handled a 30 percent increase in peak transaction volume, reaching 9,000 orders per hour or 2.6 orders per second. And we've realized all of these benefits with no impact on performance.
With our new functionality comes the ability to really personalize the experience for the customer: personalization like easy reorder, where a customer can see their prior orders and with one click, reorder. For example, we were first to market with easy rebates, which really changed the game for rebates.
Prior to working with IBM, we just didn't have the flexibility to get to market fast with new online initiatives, so the platform has helped us go to market faster, execute initiatives faster, really to serve our customers better and to stay ahead of the competition.
As the world's largest office products company, we will continue to lead the industry in delivering the best online ordering experience for our business customers.
PUTUR: What gets me really excited about this is that we're contributing to the double-digit growth of this business. It's an e-commerce business, it's online. It needs technology to drive that revenue.
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