Office Depot takes care of business

Office Depot has more than 40,000 products, 2,000 locations and an e-commerce channel. When it wanted to upgrade its system, it needed a company that could handle high pressure and working with extensive internal customizations.

Office Depot is one of the world’s largest office products retailers, counting around 50,000 employees and annual revenues of US $11 billion.

But it’s much more than a consumer level retailer.

Around 30% of Office Depot’s revenue comes from its thriving B2B business, which supplies corporate customers through contract arrangements. Almost as large are Office Depot’s international operations.

Business Goals and Challenges

There are upwards of 400,000 products in Office Depot’s extended catalogue. On the retail side, it has almost 2,000 locations under the Office Depot and OfficeMax banners, as well as an active e-commerce channel. On the B2B side, product catalogues can vary between customers. Office Depot’s international business must also navigate the disparate tax rules and regulations of dozens of foreign markets.

It’s a massive and complex system operating within a massive and complex organization. Office Depot has long relied on Endeca (now part of Oracle Commerce) to run the e-commerce side. It considers Endeca to be the gold standard for search, navigation and the personalization that drives higher conversion rates and repeat sales.

But Office Depot was running one of the earliest incarnations of Endeca Page Builder. With the growth and complexity of its business, this legacy product was pushed past capacity. Merchandisers in Office Depot’s business organization wanted better performance and new features.

Office Depot’s IT organization included a strong development team, but they were often pulled on higher priority projects.

RealDecoy was the perfect fit. Our experts understood the intricacies involved in modernizing the platform, and the experience to handle the substantial amount of customization that had been carried out on the legacy Endeca platform. Where most comparable retailers might have a few hundred unique merchandizing rules configured into their systems, Office Depot had thousands.

Our Approach

RealDecoy worked with Office Depot’s teams to migrate its legacy Endeca system to the latest version.

The bar for success was set high. The new system had to be reliable, robust and well-supported. It had to integrate existing customizations, and be flexible enough to handle variances in contract pricing, as well as the frequent price changes typical of commodity goods.

But it wasn’t just Office Depot’s IT organization that had to be satisfied. The retailer’s business organization was quite vocal and specific about its needs. Merchandisers wanted the tools to quickly create dynamic and rich landing pages that would drive better conversion and SEO, clean URLs for higher search rankings, and personalization for consumers that would drive higher order values and repeat sales. In addition, merchandisers had to be able to easily modify and update landing pages and records in real time throughout the day without bogging the system down.

Meeting all these requirements in a supported way, in an internationalized B2B and B2C environment of such massive scale, with all the existing customizations in place, was a huge undertaking. It was a soup-to-nuts scenario that included requirements, technology and training.

Results

We turned the project around in six months without any significant disruptions to Office Depot’s daily operations. Office Depot’s stakeholders have been thrilled with the results since the new system went live in early in 2014.

There is no other CX applications company capable of executing on such a complex undertaking. The company’s partners and clients acknowledge RealDecoy as an industry authority on digital experience management.

With Office Depot, one of the world’s largest and most complex retail operations, nothing less than the best would do to satisfy the needs of its demanding IT and business teams. We proved we had the experience and expertise to rise to the challenge.