apidays London 2023 - Creating business value during the age of uncertainty, Simon Suarez, Absolutelabs

apidays London 2023 - APIs for Smarter Platforms and Business Processes
September 13 & 14, 2023

Creating business value during the age of uncertainty
Simon Suarez, Director, Enterprise Architecture at Absolutelabs

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Transcript

1. /absolutelab absolute_labs contact@Absolutelabs.co Creating business value in the age of uncertainty Simon Suarez Director, Enterprise Architecture September, 2023
2. A Quick introduction © 2023 Absolute Retail Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved. 2 Simon Suarez Director, Enterprise Architecture 15 years working in tech positions for various Retailers such as as Kering, LVMH and Sweaty Betty Currently working at Absolutelabs a UK based global challenger consultancy leading large digital transformations for global retailers.
3. “The age of uncertainty” © 2023 Absolute Retail Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved. 3 Why are we where we are? Geopolitical & environmental tensions The aftereffects of the pandemic Downturn in world economy Consumer Shifts
4. “The age of uncertainty” © 2023 Absolute Retail Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved. 4 What have we seen in the retail market? Reduced Spending Power & no desire to replace legacy systems An increasing amount of acquisitions of failing retailers by private equity groups Company Closure
5. The API led approach © 2023 Absolute Retail Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved. 5 Why does it counter uncertainty? Allows a retailer to sweat the assets they have! Enables agility and scale! Futureproofs for evergreening Introduces new modern capabilities Makes the retailer a better investment prospect Fosters innovative thinking!
6. An example © 2023 Absolute Retail Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved. 6 A large retailer have been struggling and aspire towards headless commerce and enabling omnichannel to raise revenue. They are operating a 18-year-old highly customised ERP that has limited out of the box integration capabilities and is highly customised towards their historical business. They have also just been purchased by a private equity group who are looking to transform the prospects of the business without hedging their bets on replacing large systems so a multi-million-pound project to move from their current solutions is off the table.
7. Decomposing the ERP – becoming best of breed © 2023 Absolute Retail Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved. 7 Rather than rebuilding the world in a day; We look towards building up a series of APIs to connect their existing stack to new cloud native, best of breed API based platforms. Product Price Assortment Customer Supplier Product Price Assortment Customer Supplier Order Order Status Product Price Assortment Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3
8. Enabling Scale & Agility © 2023 Absolute Retail Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved. 8 Assured Scalability for the future Given the uncertainty around retail performance having APIs managing the flow of data points around the business ensures we can scale up and down as required and across jurisdictions. Platform Agnostic APIs Generation of Value in the form of new intellectual property for the retailer. A series of services that can be reused and enhanced for future use cases. Agility to evergreen when ready The enablement of a modular/composable architecture! When appropriate, solutions can be replaced without a full rebuild.
9. Managing massive change © 2023 Absolute Retail Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved. 9 A UK based luxury retailer left the Kering group of companies in 2019. A whole new technology stack was put in as a standalone company with an API led integration approach. What happened a few years later was unexpected.. A new technology stack is introduced a standalone retailer away from the group structure. Everything is new, ERP, POS, D2C platforms. A change in leadership and direction triggered the re-platform of the ERP. Given an API led approach had been initiated in the 1st iteration of the transformation, all interfaces were migrated in months! 2019 2020 2021
10. Ensuring Value © 2023 Absolute Retail Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved. 10 Utilise monitoring & observability as precursor to operational excellence Create Communities of Practice & empower business teams Ensure the governance is in place to ensure a solid implementation Reflect on successes and failures Keep abreast on the relevant news and industry trends Executive buy-in is key!
11. Some food for thought © 2023 Absolute Retail Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved. 11 Modern Architecture has changed progressively over the last 40 years, now that we are looking towards a more fluid and pragmatic way of dealing with problems using APIs and other cloud services, what will be next. Will we see a new standalone architectural pattern or a hybrid approach. At least for the near future I believe the latter, but as we have been discussing.. With uncertain times nothing is a sure bet. Mainframe Monolithic Client - Server Web Application SOA Microservices 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s Today
12. Questions © 2023 Absolute Retail Consulting Ltd. All rights reserved. 12