Vision Express Case Study

The Client

Vision Express (VE) is the third-largest optical retailer in the UK and part of GrandVision, the global optical retailer, operating across 44 countries and spanning 6,100 stores and online.

Vision Express has around 575 stores across the UK and Ireland – from big-city locations to local high street stores.

They are committed to delivering superior, high quality, and affordable eye care to more and more people around the world.

Business Challenges

Capability: Vision Express was launching a new eCommerce website, and there was a requirement to develop services (APIs) that manages the customer’s prescription and subscription information in the SAP system, and the need to have a mature integration layer in-house was deemed essential.

Timeline: The development of the eCommerce website was dependent on those services and hence the timeline to develop those services were stringent – 2 weeks.

Data Quality: Data in SAP needed to be processed and pre-validated before it was provided to the eCommerce website.

Security: Data comprised of customer’s personal and special category data. And hence it was important that services were secure.

Availability: Being an eCommerce site, high availability (24/7) was an implicit requirement.

The Solution

Given the short timeline for the development, Talend ESB was chosen to build the solution. Talend jobs and services were developed making use of Talend Joblets, where each Joblet respected the Single responsibility principle. This design improved the service quality and simplified the future maintenance of the software.

Talend‘s capability to build native Microservices helped stabilise the services, and high availability was achieved by independently deploying microservices on a number of different servers with routing controlled by a Load Balancer.

To deal with incoherent data, we built a new Talend Component, which had the capability to validate hierarchy data against a provided schema.

Core services were secured by using a simple version of the OAuth2 protocol, supported by an additional service we developed which produced authentication tokens.

The solution was enriched by using the Talend Statistics feature, where each incoming request and each Database access is being tracked. This makes monitoring the health of the system upon any performance bottleneck a straightforward task.

The Outcome

Timely delivery of services helped Vision Express meet its target date for the eCommerce website launch for the UK&I.

The services have been extremely stable since go-live. No high priority or business-critical tickets have been reported and there is also no incident of unplanned downtime to date.

We continue to support and maintain the system and add new services.

Vision Express Case Study