Building a sustainable data workflow for Alexander McQueen

  • Customer
  • Industry
  • Service
  • Segment
  • Author
  • Alexander McQueen
  • Retail
  • Cloud Automation
  • Enterprise
  • Jodie Rhodes
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At a glance

Alexander McQueen has brought drama to fashion, expanding into high-street lines like trainers, perfumes, menswear, and accessories.

Challenge

The luxury fashion house struggled with an inefficient, manual data workflow involving thousands of supplier communications, emails, and spreadsheets.

Solution

Firemind partnered with the customer to build a sustainable, scalable, and efficient data workflow by leveraging the power of the AWS cloud.

Services used
  • Amazon RDS
  • Amazon S3
  • Amazon Cognito
  • AWS Lambda
Outcomes
  • 10-day turnaround from manual to cloud-automated process.
  • 3x reduction in internal resource needed.
  • Secure and scalable cloud-based solution.
Business challenges

Managing a complex and manual data workflow

As a high-end retailer, this fashion house designs, orders and creates, tens of thousands of individual pieces every year. As they are a British fashion label, a wide majority of their garments, dresses and ensembles are made by hand within the United Kingdom. This means that they have to work with approximately 120 suppliers worldwide, sourcing materials and fabrics to craft the diverse selection of pieces.

This high quantity leads to thousands of requests, internal communications, emails and dreaded – Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The fashion label were looking for a cloud specialist to help build a more sustainable, scalable and efficient data workflow for these supplier communications and garment details.

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Solution

Firemind's multiphase approach

Firemind took a multiphase approach to enable a more automated, less manual process for the customer.

Phase one consisted of identifying and understanding the varied templates, forms and datasets in use by the customer, and their range of suppliers. Once identified, we were able to create new templates with more specific inputs and outputs for both supplier administration teams and the customer’s internal team.

We took their Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and split the one into many, ensuring that each supplier could successfully provide garment costs, weights, eco-details and more, without the confusion of a ‘one-for-all’ style submission. This granularity within form types ensured that each supplier received a form to fill that was custom to their business, not generic. Thus increasing the level of detail and accuracy within submitted fields.

Phase two is where the cloud submission, storage, retrieval and smart automations would kick in. A frontend end user interface was developed to allow the customer’s team to login and upload their Excel files (in XLSX) format. The files would then be validated and used to update a PostgreSQL database, hosted in Amazon RDS. The frontend website was built to query the database, whether on a schedule, or by user’s request, to generate the supplier reports (in the same XLSX format).

Considering the nature of the document templates (which often included; costs, locations for shipping, storage areas, business names and owner details etc), security within each step was a priority. Each file upload would dynamically generate a pre-signed URL to a secure Amazon S3 bucket. Additionally, all logins for both the customer and their suppliers would be uniquely authenticated upon every visit by using Amazon Cognito.

These phases combined ensured the fashion house could lead a more sustainable business practice, reducing the need for their skilled team to complete necessary, but heavily manual and laborious tasks. The nature of the document types and impact to their suppliers and end products will also have long reaching effects on the customer’s continued product sustainability, ensuring the end product for their global customers is sourced ethically, shipped in an environmentally friendly way and with minimum impact to local environments.

 

Time well spent

As with most of our customer projects that revolve around automation, the customer wanted to let their team work on more important projects, rather than focusing on necessary, but often laborious manual tasks. With this solution in place, their team could do just that. Effectively turning a three person job into a more relaxed one person checkover, once a quarter.

Secure and scalable

As the customer enhanced their product line and diversified further, they’ll have the option to add more and more suppliers, avoiding any risk of congestion or cloud cost overpricing, as their data scales and grows with their business needs and number of access requests.

Maintenance and support

This new infrastructure is, like all others, built to the highest standard, using the latest tools and services that Amazon Web Services (AWS) have to offer. For the customer, this ensures a more managed, supported and well maintained cloud infrastructure – forever.

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