Wesfarmers OneDigital, AWS to transform shopping experience
Wesfarmers OneDigital has announced a five-year agreement with Amazon Web Services to support the business's developing data and digital platform to deliver the best value and services for its customers.
The new agreement means AWS will be the strategic cloud provider across the Wesfarmers Group.
Formally launched in July 2022, Wesfarmers OneDigital aims to deliver a more seamless and personalised omnichannel experience across the Wesfarmers retail businesses, including Bunnings Warehouse, Kmart, Officeworks, and Target. Wesfarmers sees about 1.5 million digital transactions and 210 million digital interactions across the Group every month.
Migrating to AWS allowed OneDigital to access high quality engineering and delivery talent pools that existed across Wesfarmers. As part of the new agreement, AWS can enable Wesfarmers to establish an AWS Skills Guild for each Group division with a plan for widespread enablement, engagement, and training across the Groups technical and business teams, with a goal to train 500 employees with AWS Training and Certification courses.
"A critical part of this collaboration is AWS's support for our OnePass membership program, which has been built using AWS native services," says Nicole Sheffield, Managing Director, Wesfarmers OneDigital.
"We aim to grow this program to be an essential household helper with customers using OnePass to receive free shipping across our retail brands on eligible purchases, with additional benefits for shopping in-store and exclusive offers," he says.
"The wide range of services from AWS allows us to quickly build and run modern applications without having to worry about managing infrastructure. This allows our team to remain focused on delivering great customer experiences rather than managing technology."
Rianne van Veldhuizen, Managing Director, AWS, Australia and New Zealand, adds, "Australian shopping behaviours and expectations have fundamentally changed over the past decade, compelling retailers to personalise experiences, reduce the friction of discovering and buying, and cost optimise through digital transformation.
"We are proud to collaborate with an iconic Australian brand like Wesfarmers to help create industry-leading solutions that accelerates retail digitisation across its brands," van Veldhuizen says.
"Together with AWS, OneDigital is investing in a flexible cloud platform to support long-term growth, allowing the teams to innovate faster on behalf of Wesfarmers customers. This can help unlock new insights into shopping behaviour, enabling Wesfarmers to not just grow sales and differentiate its brands, but also transform customer engagement and drive loyalty."
In 2019, Kmart committed to train 1,400 employees (100 percent of its technical staff and 80 percent of its non-technical head office employees) through an internal program called SPARK, with the skills needed to innovate with cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning technology.
As AWS is the strategic cloud provider for Kmart, Target, Officeworks, Catch and flybuys, OneDigital was able to leverage existing skills and experience across the Wesfarmers portfolio, off the back of SPARK, to launch OnePass in months, not years. This allowed teams to rapidly build and deploy over 20 Amazon ECS services and 50 AWS Lambda functions.
Wesfarmers leverages AWS Marketplace, a curated digital catalogue that customers can use to find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software, data, and services, allowing OneDigital to quickly onboard and integrate with ecommerce platforms, customer relationship management systems (Salesforce), and payment gateways (Stripe and PayPal).
Amazon Managed Workflows, AWS Lambda, and other tooling enables OneDigital to ingest and unify customer data from multiple sources. Wesfarmers leveraged Amazon Personalise to launch a recommendation engine in days that allowed OneDigital to have more meaningful engagement by providing more relevant product recommendations in real-time.
OneDigital runs Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) at the core of the OnePass platform, enabling OneDigital to build responsive systems using an event-driven architecture. Amazon MSK is a streaming data service that manages infrastructure and operations making it easier for OneDigitals developer and DevOps managers to operate the platform without needing to be experts.
