Brands such as sports and footwear company Diadora and luxury shoe retailer Sergio Rossi engage Diana to design, develop and manage their websites, look after their warehouses and operations, and take charge of their customer care, which involves a huge amount of data.
However, CTO Valentino Baraldo made it clear that he and his team at Diana are more techies than they are fashionistas. “Our main focus is on the development and the design. We are renown for the quality of the design. We care a lot about the details because we are engineers who happen to work in fashion.”
Baraldo said the most important data they receive is product data which essentially gives an electronic identity to a physical product. It includes information like the names and sizes of the product and attributes necessary to sell it online. They also take in data about inventory levels for stock stored in the warehouses. The main difficulty of dealing with all this data is managing the lifecycle of it, from the ingestion to the final export.
The CTO said there were two main problems. The first was the master data management, a challenge faced by not only Diana but by its clients as well, which involves managing master data to perform the right operation on it. He expanded with examples of “quality assurance tests or data enrichment or other kinds of operation that you have to perform on master data and the awareness that you have to define a golden record.”
The second challenge is integration of data from so many systems from complex businesses. Baraldo said that in this case, it is ideal to have a system that manages the product information and can also manage inventory levels and orders, to consolidate the inventory at and dispatch orders from different locations.
To overcome these challenges, Baraldo and his team turned to Boomi, a Dell Technologies Business, which is an iPaaS or an integration platform as a service. Principal technologist Mike Kiersey described Boomi’s main capability as connecting various different sources of applications, data processes and people through one platform and framework.
Platforms from Informatica and MuleSoft from Salesforce were also on Baraldo’s shortlist but he decided to choose Boomi because of the flexibility it offered, the number of connectors available and the pricing model which he found convenient.
“Customers synchronise various elements of data across their systems.”
Kiersey said: “Customers that leverage our platform usually come on board just to connect one or two applications together and synchronise various elements of data across their system so they get better visibility.”
Although Diana began using Boomi in January 2019 and many processes have been deployed and many efficiency savings have been made, the full migration has not been completed as yet.
“We reduced the time span of managing integration.”
However, for Baraldo the benefits are clear. He said: “We saw that we reduced the time span of managing integration modelling. Orders are generated in our commerce platforms and are pushed into our order management system as soon as they are produced. A percentage of the total number of orders was blocked for many reasons including incorrect data and with Boomi, we were able to improve the way we did that.” He added: “We built the integration between the two systems, so improving the quality control checks.”
Integration is one of the key components, according to Kiersey but others are the data management capability, the B2B capability which facilitates connections with third parties, and the ability to build customer workflows.
Kiersey said: “It is about helping organisations connect what they have in their business, get smarter insight faster. It is all about the speed and productivity.”
