Speed to market for METRO’s B2B marketplace

Challenge

In 2018, wholesale specialist METRO decided to launch its own marketplace, offering products not only from its own assortment but also involving partner sellers.

The marketplace had to be built from scratch in 9 months, allowing to quickly adapt to changing customer needs – without having to deal with infrastructure topics.

Responsible for development and operation of the marketplace is METRO’s subsidiary METRO Markets, who decided to partner with Ciklum to meet the tough delivery deadline.

In 9 months built a marketplace entirely from scratch
Organised the project team, that scaled from a handful of people to around 150 at launch
Established structures and processes to ensure smooth cooperation
Implemented a data-based forecasting system to accurately estimate the delivery of features

Solution

TEAM STRUCTURE

Cross-functional teams built according to the so-called Spotify framework, where autonomous teams work in squads, with horizontal feature-focus.
15 Agile delivery teams, of which 6 were located in Dusseldorf and 9 in Kyiv, plus a central DevOps team operating from Kyiv.

DATA-DRIVEN FORECASTING

Implemented a data-based forecasting system, and a tool called ActionableAgile. Based on JIRA data and past team performance, we were able to accurately estimate the probability of completing certain features.
Having reliable forecasting at hand, the teams were able to effectively organise their day-to-day work, re-prioritise where needed and deliver everything precisely on time.

Technology

AngularJS 7/8
NodeJs 10.16
GoLang (latest)
Symfony 4
Doctrine 2
PHP 7.3
Nginx (latest)
GCloud Cloud SQL (MySQL 5.7)
GCloud Pub/Sub
GCloud Memorystore (Redis)
MongoDB Atlas (MongoDB 4)
Elasticsearch Cloud (ES 7)
Kubernetes GKE
GCloud Stackdriver
Docker
Terraform
Helm
Jenkins

Result

Speed to market through autonomous teams owning the outcome, and data-driven forecasting.

The cross-located team, with almost 150 experts in Germany and Ukraine, ensured seamless go-live of the platform.

Reduced time to production for new features and functionalities to 40 min, through applied DevOps best practices.

The tech stack allows METRO Markets to deliver code and add it to new and existing functionality in production several times a day.

Successful launch of a new, scalable business model for METRO, to be rolled out across Europe.

Following a successful pilot, METRO Marketplace will be rolled out to other European countries. As of April 2020, more than 250 partner sellers were using the platform, and more than 200,000 non-food articles were on offer.

Through the platform developed with Ciklum, METRO expanded its services by supporting both traditional brick-and-mortar business as well as providing a fully-fledged digital service for a wider customer base. This pioneering marketplace changes the way the HoReCa sector buys and sells to one another, with a frictionless transactional experience that delivers benefits to our partners and customers.

Philipp Blome: CEO at METRO Markets

Flexibly scaling development for a global health engagement platform