Increasingly, online and brick-and-mortar retailers are merging. This has been one of the many reasons for METRO, a leading international wholesale company, to promote digitization within the organization.

Due to rapidly changing market conditions, METRO has had to continually develop new digital products within a very short period of time.

ThoughtWorks' approach to distributed delivery and its access to IT talent from across the world was just what was needed to ensure the rapid development of new products at METRO.

In distributed delivery, depending on business requirements and context, the teams are assembled in various constellations. For example, all developer teams may be on-site, in the same place, referred to as onshore, or they could be working offsite in other locations, also referred to as offshore.

ThoughtWorks worked with METRO.digital to create a team model that best supported their business goals. In this case, a distributed team across Germany and India.

In order to create short-term roadmaps for OKRs, teams conducted idea and prioritization workshops every few months with METRO.digital product owners and various stakeholders. ThoughtWorks contributed its expertise in user experience (UX) and design, product thinking, architecture, microservices and retail and partnered with METRO.digital to ensure that the workshops were productive and result-oriented. User research conducted by ThoughtWorks also assisted in adapting developed solutions to the needs of different European countries. 

As a result of this project, METRO.digital and ThoughtWorks are using the success of distributed delivery to scale their collaboration. Currently, around 140 employees work in 12 development teams at four locations in Germany and India.

METRO.digital's first distributed delivery success story with ThoughtWorks came in 2016 with the development of a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool for sales. This new CRM system was intended to enable salespeople to plan and monitor their customer portfolios more efficiently. In addition, product recommendations could be made based on purchase history or inventory. The new CRM system was able to go live just three months after the start of the project. The system is now used by more than 8,500 sales representatives in 16 countries in Europe and Asia.

Other successful digital products which were developed through distributed delivery include the new warehouse management system that is used in Germany and Poland, as well as an app that lets drivers track and manage deliveries.

We are proud that METRO.digital entrusts our teams in India with their data-intensive applications. The partnership between METRO.digital and ThoughtWorks has helped the group continue its impressive growth story while staying ahead of the competition on their digital journey.