Pet Circle tightly integrates its e-commerce operations – iTnews

Pet Circle is more tightly connecting all the technology elements that underpin its e-commerce operations, as it seeks to optimise several years of investments.
CTO Denis Hoctor told the iTnews Podcast that Pet Circle’s focus on technology over the past few years had moved through growing range and improving logistics to data insights and customer experience.
The focus now is on connecting all of those pieces – and investments – in a way that Pet Circle is able to maximise benefits from a tightly-integrated sum of these parts.
For customers, the success of that effort will be reflected in the front-facing experience and a better standard of service overall.
This includes Pet Circle having much greater and more granular control over its logistics operations, including potentially a fully-owned national last-mile delivery service, which it is trialling in Perth.
“In the next five years, the high level [goal] is really about connecting and creating the opportunity for a really smart e-commerce business to do more for customers by knowing the right context from past deliveries at the right time,” Hoctor said.
“From the capability of our fulfilment centres and our fleet at any given point in time, are we offering the right service for the customer? Through to what is the range that matters that we should head to next as we put limited resources into growing range and delivering the right experience.
“It's that balancing act, and the connected system is the focus for helping inform how our business decides how to operate.”
The technology architecture and teams
Pet Circle – Australia’s largest online pet supply store – fulfils tens of thousands of online orders a week, with volumes continuing to grow, according to Hoctor.
Its technology and engineering work is backed by a team of around 54 people.
Strategically, technology and engineering is focused on three areas – supporting customer acquisition and engagement, the online shopping and services experience, and delivery.
There’s also a fourth internal-facing strategic objective around “how we're partnering with the business and keeping a balance between always-on and speed-to-value,” Hoctor noted.
In parallel with its progressive systems investments, Hoctor said there’d been a focus on having the right tooling and team structure to support the company’s growth ambitions.
Operationally, the company runs on “two monoliths that reflect the customer experience and the site experience”, and an inhouse-built enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
“Between [those systems] we have a chunk of microservices,” Hoctor said.
Its current cloud platform of choice for infrastructure hosting and its data environment is Google Cloud.
The data environment has been hosted in Google Cloud for several years, but has recently been revamped to support the increased importance Pet Circle is placing on being data-driven operationally.
More granular use of data is helping Pet Circle to drive better logistics services and customer experience outcomes.
“We've taken a lot of time to transform what was a transactional-focused architecture and platform into one that is [not just] customer-centric, but per-order customer-centric,” Hoctor said.
“We had insights in a separate platform that could be done in isolation, but they were never connected back in [to the core data environment].
“Something that we've spent the last year prototyping and creating initial value from is actually re-operationalising that insight, and as that has come together it’s proven to be valuable.
“The strategy is now focused on how we have a platform that actually facilitates that.
“That's where Google Cloud is really a great partner in that space given we've moved across to Looker for our business intelligence tool.
“We also have a customer data platform that sits beside that that we've built ourselves, but on top of the Google Cloud tools.”
On the logistics side, Hoctor said that Pet Circle’s technology and engineering teams had “leaned in and built a technology stack that creates full visibility” of orders for customer and couriers.
“We spent the time to make sure that we took full ownership [of the end-to-end logistics process],” Hoctor said.
That meant understanding a series of “edge cases” that resulted in delays or unsuccessful deliveries, so that they could be reflected in messaging, which in turn meant establishing “visibility at a driver level inside our systems”.
The result of that work is customers have better visibility into how their orders are progressing, and Pet Circle has greater assurance that its service standards are being met.

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