Boyner - Case study

Omnichannel retail for Boyner Group customers with NGI Commerce Suite from Runibex

To improve customer experience, Boyner Group launched a digital conversion programme at the end of 2014. It wanted to deliver a consistent experience across its in-store, web and mobile capabilities, and it chose NGI Commerce Suite from Runibex so that its stores could keep pace with their customers.

At a glance

Customer	Boyner Group
Industry	Retail, in formats from luxury fashion brand stores and multi-storey retailing to e-commerce and mobile commerce
Scale	Seven group companies, hundreds of brands, 10,000 employees, over 20 million registered customers and more than 500 stores (figures from the original case study)
Platform	NGI Commerce Suite from Runibex
Cloud platform	AWS
Headline outcomes	Seven domains managed centrally within one team; all systems scaled with load
Runibex role	NGI Commerce Suite; recommended AWS for the programme; automated test and staging systems with AWS Lambda and AWS CloudFormation; monitoring and alerting through Runibex managed services alongside Amazon CloudWatch

About the Boyner Group

At the time of the original case study, Boyner Group was a publicly traded retail group made up of seven companies: Altınyıldız, A&Y Marka Magazacılık, Beymen, Boyner Büyük Magazacılık, BR Magazacılık, Hopi and Morhipo. It represented hundreds of brands, employed 10,000 people, had over 20 million registered customers and more than 500 stores. It traded in formats from luxury fashion brand stores and multi-storey retailing to e-commerce and mobile commerce. Its total turnover in 2018 was $1.5 billion.

The Challenge

With e-commerce growing quickly, the group launched a digital conversion programme at the end of 2014 so that its stores could keep pace with their customers. The aim was to bring every retail business in the group onto a model where web and mobile are in active use, with in-store sales support applications and Click and Collect. The group also wanted to deploy the whole e-commerce infrastructure quickly without treating offline, web and mobile customers differently. Boyner called this strategy “All-line retail”.

When Boyner chose NGI Commerce Suite, the factor that weighed most, beyond the product itself, was the infrastructure as a whole. It had to cover seven domains and the applications attached to them, including in-store sales support, warehousing, in-store operations and product collection. Every one of them had to scale. The infrastructure also had to be stable, sustainable and secure, with flexibility in disaster recovery scenarios.

Why AWS

Runibex recommended AWS for the programme. Because this was a long-term programme, the infrastructure needed to grow as each domain was adopted and to scale if the business grew quickly, while staying cost-efficient. Those requirements were the reasons for choosing AWS.

The architecture

High API loads. The front end and the in-store and mobile apps generated high API loads, so the environment used AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon ElastiCache to handle heavy load and scale with it.
Uninterrupted database access. The systems ran around the clock under constant load, and Amazon RDS with Multi-AZ was chosen to keep database access uninterrupted.
Load distribution and images. Elastic Load Balancing was paired with Amazon S3 to keep load distribution healthy and lossless, and S3 served close to 5TB of images. Amazon EC2 was also part of the configuration.
Operational scope. The environment had to carry order management with 170,000 active product variants for a single domain, in-store work orders, product collection operations, four back-office systems and more than 30 near-real-time integrations, some of them with third parties.
Test and staging automation. Once the rollout was complete, Boyner needed to run all seven domains from one team. Runibex used AWS Lambda and AWS CloudFormation so that test and staging systems opened and closed automatically when they were needed.
Monitoring and support. Monitoring and alerting ran through Runibex managed services alongside Amazon CloudWatch, backed by AWS Technical Support.

The results

Measure

Result

Central management

Boyner was able to manage seven domains centrally within one team, across many technologies and integrations.

Scalability

All systems scaled with load, and resources could also be increased manually when needed.

Environment automation

Test and staging systems opened and closed automatically when needed, using AWS Lambda and AWS CloudFormation.

Scale handled

Order management with 170,000 active product variants in a single domain, four back-office systems, more than 30 near-real-time integrations, and close to 5TB of images on Amazon S3.

Growth

The group met its growth targets within two years, including during the first transitional years.

Cloud capability

Working through the project with Runibex gave Boyner’s technical teams significant experience of cloud technologies, and confidence for using cloud in future IT investments.

Programme scale

Described in the published account as one of Turkey’s largest digital transformation projects and one of the most comprehensive projects using the cloud.

In the customer's words

“We needed infrastructures to handle potentially large amount of business growth. All ecommerce projects of ours, which we go live with Runibex and its affiliates, are in the cloud and it completely meets all our demands. We utilise more then one cloud service and infrastructure and we were able to achieve these with AWS and Runibex Technology Group,”

Sedat Yıldırım, Omnichannel Retail & Technology Director, Boyner

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Why did Boyner Group choose NGI Commerce Suite from Runibex?

Boyner Group chose NGI Commerce Suite from Runibex for the e-commerce infrastructure behind a digital conversion programme it launched at the end of 2014. The programme aimed to deliver a consistent experience across Boyner’s in-store, web and mobile capabilities so that its stores could keep pace with their customers. Boyner called the strategy “All-line retail”.

Which AWS services did the Boyner Group environment use?

Boyner Group’s environment used Amazon RDS with Multi-AZ, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon ElastiCache and Elastic Load Balancing. Runibex used AWS Lambda and AWS CloudFormation so that test and staging systems opened and closed automatically when needed. Monitoring and alerting ran through Runibex managed services alongside Amazon CloudWatch, backed by AWS Technical Support.

How many domains did Boyner Group manage, and how?

Boyner Group was able to manage seven domains centrally within one team, across many technologies and integrations. All systems scaled with load, and resources could also be increased manually when needed.

What scale did the Boyner Group environment handle?

The Boyner Group environment carried order management with 170,000 active product variants in a single domain, in-store work orders, product collection operations, four back-office systems and more than 30 near-real-time integrations, some of them with third parties. Amazon S3 served close to 5TB of images.