Case Study Moebel.de

Moebel.de Einrichten & Wohnen AG, Germany: https://www.moebel.de/
Moebel.de is the largest online furniture portal in Germany. On moebel.de you can find over 1,000,000 Furniture and furnishings products from more than 250 online shops. It has been established in 2007 and since then it has attractive products from the world of living, for you to order directly online. All stores are tested and certified. Price transparency, secure payments and a professional customer service are the focus areas. Moebel.de provides maximum safety and service to its partners. According to moebel.de motto "find furniture that you love", it has the portal clearly structured for users. You can choose the desired category on the navigation and compare a variety of vendors.

Moebel.de is part of huge network known as ProSiebenSat.1, Germany's largest TV Network and listed in German Stock Exchange.

1. Challenge: Here are some of the challenges:
a. This website was expected to have huge amount of data (it was expected to have more than 1 million products).
b. This website was expected to have huge amount of traffic, daily visitors in the tune of 1,00,000.
c. It is a huge brand name in Germany, so website should have quick response time and no/minimal downtime.
d. Huge backend processing tasks, as almost every day new data was coming up on the website.

2. Technology: After lot of research we finalized Hybris Platform. It is a Java/Spring based Framework and now acquired by SAP. It has the provision of handling huge amount of data and still maintaining good response time. We also implemented multiple servers (with load balancer) and caching techniques. We used SOLR and Fredhopper for Products listing and Search. We used Agile Methodology to execute the project.

3. Interpretation of the problem, limitations: The main problem was how to handle huge data which is regularly getting updated, there has to be a solid backend process which will be running all the time and updating the data, so that visitors always get to see updated products. Another problem/limitation was to have response time less than 1 seconds, so good and smart caching technique needs to be used.

4. Team: The team structure was as follows:
a. Project Manager : 15 years of experience
b. Business Analyst: 12 years of experience
c. Technical Architect: 15 years of experience
d. Team of 10 Senior and Junior Developers having experience between 3 - 8 years.
e. Team of 4 Quality Assurance people having experience between 4 - 10 years.
f. Scrum Master: 8 years of experience
The total time it took to release the first phase was 8 months.

5. Successful implementation:
a. Successfully able to achieve response time less than 1 seconds
b. Successfully able to implement the project on time
c. Successfully able to build backend which processes 1 million products daily
d. Successfully able to handle visitors in the tune of 1,00,000 daily
e. Successfully able to implement processing system which can handle huge number of transaction without any error.
f. Successfully able to build an infrastructure which can be horizontally and vertically scalable.

6. Additional point: There was another challenge for us to learn Hybris Technology which was comparatively very new, so we hired external trainers, build team in-house and then did successful implementation.